Talent on Main Street

COULEE CITY — Seven local businesses played host to artists from the Basin at the third annual Coulee City Art Walk on Friday.

The walk brought a pretty good-sized turnout to the town of about 600, said Don Nutt, owner of Cariboo Trail Studio and the organizer of the event,

“It’s kind of been in waves,” Nutt said. “I stepped out just for a second, and all the parking spaces were pretty much filled on Main Street. And the next time I looked, there weren’t very many there, so I think it’s just going to be a lot of people filtering in here and there.”

The artists included painters, authors, sculptors and woodworkers. The tour covered four blocks of Coulee City’s Main Street and began at Cariboo Trail Studio. The second stop was Valley Agronomics, where painter Valerie Sater was showing her custom acrylic paintings. Sater, who lives in Ford, about 25 miles northwest of Spokane, usually works on commission. People send her photos of a pet or a loved one and she paints from that, she said.

“I’ve been drawing since I was 10, 11, 12,” Sater said. “But as far as painting, that’s just been in the last 20 years. It just keeps getting a little bit bigger and a little bit more … (Most of) what I do is Christmas and birthdays and holidays and memorials.”

This was Sater’s first time exhibiting her art, she said. Among the offerings on display were a portrait of three of her horses dipping down to drink, a memorial painting of a baby with his grandfather and an adobe building in Arizona.

“I loved all the texture in (the adobe) and how close a lot of the colors were. It made it a challenge to separate so it didn’t look like just one door,” Sater said.

Karen Reffett of Moses Lake had a wall of pencil drawings on display at Spokane Teachers Credit Union. She, too, was showing for the first time.

“I’ve never done a show because I’ve never had enough stuff framed at one time to display,” she said. “It’s hard to show (art) that’s just in a shrink-wrap on a foam core. And then when you sell something like that, the framers don’t want to trim it, even though I say trim it if you need to.”

There were authors out as well. Local history gurus John Kemble and Dan Bolyard had a table at the Thompson Hotel with their books and some vintage photos of the local area. And SaDonna Heathman was at the Coulee City Library with some drawings and covers of the children’s book she’s preparing to publish called “Sploot!” Splooting, she explained, is when squirrels sprawl on the ground during very hot weather and don’t move even when people get close to them.

“I thought that was pretty funny and I thought the word ‘sploot’ was hilarious, and I thought that would be a great thing for kids to know more about,” Heathman said. “I started writing a little manuscript and pulled images online to try to visually direct my story.”

Heathman made contact with an illustrator in North Dakota, she said, who made drawings to go with the story. Then she taught herself to work with graphic design software to lay out the book.

“The last page is all about splooting,” she said. “It’s to teach kids a little bit of science about what to do if you see an animal doing this, why they do it and things like that.”

At the other end of Main Street, the Highlighters Art Club galley hosted not only the club’s own work, but also a children’s art contest.

“They invite any children who are school-aged to enter the contest with any piece of art,” said Jennifer Schuh, who teaches art for the Coulee-Hartline School District. “I can be photographs, it can be painting, it can be ink, pencil, crochet.”

The show wasn’t as busy as it had been in years past, Nutt said.

“The first time we did this, we had 400 or 500 people here and it was quite the madhouse,” he said. “This year so far it seems like a couple of hundred, which is fine. As long as people have a good time.”

    Valerie Sater shows an acrylic painting she did of three of her horses. The Coulee City Art Walk Friday was the first time Sater had shown her art, she said.
  

    Children’s author SaDonna Heathman shows some drawings for her upcoming children’s book, entitled “Sploot!”
  

    This finely detailed pencil drawing by Karen Reffett of a long-ago wheat harvest was on display at the Coulee City Art Walk Friday.
  

    Almira/Coulee-Hartline students got to have their own art show at the Coulee City Art Walk Friday, hosted by the Highlighters Art Club.
  

    Dannah Gajewski of Soap Lake looks over paintings at Don Nutt’s Cariboo Trail Studio during the Coulee City Art Walk Friday.