Coeur de paint: Kathy Gale's art spirit

By ELENA JOHNSON

For Coeur Voice

Kathy Gale’s brush scratched green across her white canvas. Her hand was rough but precise, grabbing paint in a scoop and etching it in jagged, horizontal zigzags.

“This is not rocket science,” Gale said during her artist demo at The Art Spirit Gallery Feb. 18.

“See how difficult that was?” she joked. “No, it wasn’t difficult.”

In contrast to these textured strokes of color, Gale is a tidy artist. Narrating her process to attentive viewers, she cleared excess acrylic paint from her palette – which was pristine before the demo.

Gale also wiped her hands between using different colors and said she prefers to wear gloves and use nontoxic paint when she works.

“I’d like to live and paint a long time. So I think it’s smart,” she said.

The demo was organized by Art Spirit Gallery in part to raise awareness for her show next month. Gale, a painter who frequently produces colorful, Impressionist-style still-lifes and landscapes featuring the Northwest, will be featured with two other regional artists.

Gale has been an artist her entire life, although she credits being taken into her father’s office at age 10 to draw Charles Marion Russell calendars as being especially influential in turning her toward a career in art. Russell was an artist whose creations resembled Norman Rockwell and favored the American West.

“I just loved Charlie Russell. I thought he was a cool guy.”

Despite an early love of art, Gale only recently began painting again after a 17-year break. Marriage and four children helped put her painting on hold while she taught literacy in grades K through 5.

Now that she’s back in the art world, Gale continues learning and practicing. She’s even attended fellow artist Terry Lee’s weekly open painting session in his Hayden studio. She also hopes to add portraiture to her repertoire.

Although oil painting is her signature and acrylic her new medium, the painter has worked with a little of everything, including pastel, charcoal, watercolor, and graphite. She has also done some print-making and would like to explore it further.

“I’m still finding my way,” she said. “I think painting is a lifelong study event.”

Gale has a tendency to paint thinly, with thinner paint layers and less surface texture to the paint, a quality that may stem from her experience working with oil paints – which produce a thinner, smoother finish.

Now that she has begun working in acrylic paints, which dry quickly and tend to leave a thicker, sticky texture, Gale started to add a textured layer of gesso - sometimes used to prime a canvas - before painting, adding an illusion of thickness to her paint layer.

“Everyone says, ‘You need to use more paint, Kathy,’ and I thought, ‘I’ll just trick ‘em,” she laughed.

For all her talk of tricks and modesty, Gale is a long-studied artist. She’s taken formal lessons since fifth grade, when she was privately tutored in drawing by a nun. She went on to earn a Bachelor’s in art from Gonzaga University, where she was able to participate in a year-long program in Florence.

“It was stunningly influential. I think I created a style while I was there,” she said.

“Basically I was an impressionist [already] and it just kind of sealed the deal.”

Gale has only recently come back to landscapes. Familiarity and love for the region’s scenery, combined with the need to produce for her upcoming shows at The Art Spirit and Cole Gallery in Edmonds, Wash., have encouraged her return.

“It’s my home. It’s what I know,” she said. “I’ve lived here my entire life.”

It isn’t just the land that pulls her, but “chickens, cows, and sheep, too,” as well as telephone poles, farms, and silos.

“They’re part of the landscape,” she said. “I think it’s [all] exciting.”

She drives to Portland often to see her children and likes to take pictures from the road to use as reference photos. Although as an Impressionist, her portrayals may not always seem exact.

“I’m not going for perfection,” she told her small crowd of attendees. “I’m going for that feeling you get when you say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful.’”

Art, it seems, has a way of finding some later in life, whether reminding them of an earlier passion or helping them discover a latent one.

Pam Ness walked into the gallery on a whim with her mother during the demonstration. Ness began taking art classes at North Idaho College, taking advantage of a discount for students over 60.

“I’m so passionate about it, [although] I’m finding it really late,” said Ness. “It’s invaluable. It teaches you so many things.”

Ness grew up in a rural area in North Dakota, where she says access to art education was diminished. Now she has studied drawing, oil painting, watercolor and art history, and jokes that her dining room table has become her artist’s studio.

Ness has met Gale before and wrote a paper on the featured artist for her survey of art class. She is now the proud owner of several of Gale’s works. Ness thinks owning art is equally invaluable.

“You look at it every day and it changes with the lighting, your mood, when you’re viewing it…” Ness said. “I have goosebumps just talking about it.”

Like Ness, much of Gale’s eager audience were new or experienced artists developing their skills, taking notes and occasionally asking questions of the painter.

The gallery periodically hosts such demonstrations, which benefit artists and community members alike, according to Chelsea Cordova, Gallery Floor Manager at The Art Spirit.

“[People] want to hear from our artists, get to know them.”

Gale’s work has been featured at the gallery for years. Cordova says it’s a community gallery’s role to support artists like her.

“Art is a business, and people that have chosen to have a career out of making art deserve to have their business supported and that is what a community gallery does.”

Art’s role in society is equally important to the gallery’s owner, Blair Williams, who said the economic impact of art often goes under-recognized.

“It’s already proven to be one of the cornerstones to a strong economy,” she said.

“Art is what encourages the creative sector...[and] a creative economy builds a stronger community overall.”

Most of Art Spirit’s artists are from the regional Northwest, and at least 10 to 15 percent are from the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane area, said Cordova.

“Local galleries give artists a place to show. We cannot operate in a vacuum,” said Gale.

The gallery is modeled as an ‘urban grange hall.’ Once centers for more rural communities, grange halls were a gathering place for farmers, public spaces for markets and quilting bees – whatever a community needed.

The Art Spirit Gallery strives to be an urban version of that, offering a space for artists and community members to be creative, learn, and connect. In addition to periodic demonstrations and participation in events like Art Walk, the gallery puts a new show up on the second Friday of each month, and plans shows one year in advance.

“I think art is for all,” Gale added. “It speaks to everyone. Thank God we have it.”

Gale’s work will go on display for next month’s show beginning March 13 and will also feature work by Mel Griffin and Gordon Wilson.

The Art Spirit Gallery on Sherman Avenue is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. To learn more about Gale’s work see Kathygaleart.com or her Instagram account @kathygaleart.