Galleries will feature eclectic displays of art

Downtown Camas’ three art galleries will celebrate the openings of new shows during First Friday. Artist’s receptions will be held at each venue from 5 to 8 p.m.

The exhibitions will include one highlighting the work of three landscape painters, another that includes artwork created from devil’s claw seed pods and feathers, and the third featuring the paintings and raku pottery of a well-known husband-and-wife team.

That Camas couple is Dave and Boni Deal, who will exhibit their work March 4 through 26 at the Second Story Gallery, upstairs in the Camas Public Library.

Lifelong Pacific Northwest potters, the Deals have worked full-time in the ceramic art of raku for 40 years, since their early days at Clark College in Vancouver.

Their work is shown in prominent Northwest galleries and in public and private collections worldwide, and is known for large classical forms and intricate surface design.

They sell selected pieces at Camas Gallery and their work is permanently on display at the Camas library where they were commissioned to create a clay Mount Hood scene as part of the 2003 building renovation.

The Deals are inspired by the natural environment.

“We hike in the Columbia Gorge and Cascade Mountains, and our Camas area home and workshop is in the woods and off-the-grid, so we enjoy nature themes, like native plants and wildlife — God’s creations,” Boni Deal said.

The couple works together on each of their ceramic pieces. Dave Deal focuses on forming clay on the potters wheel, glazing and firing. Raku pottery involves a dramatic firing technique that originated in 16th century Japan.

He pulls the orange-hot pot from the 2,000 degree kiln and lowers it into a barrel of fir boughs and organic burnables. Rapid cooling, flames and smoke give raku its distinctive crackled glaze, smoky tones and metallic accents.

Boni Deal’s paintings are acrylics executed in water-color style made to harmonize with the pottery.

Their upcoming show, titled “Dave and Boni Deal: Raku Ceramics & Paintings,” will reflect Pacific Northwest imagery, a constant theme in the Deals’ work. The exhibition will include about 30 pieces, ranging from small batik raku bowls, to triptychs and platters for the wall, to a large egret ewer more than 4 feet high.

According to Dave Deal the ewer, a graceful pitcher with thin spout, is unique in how the pottery form has an overlaid heron drawing that echoes potter-terminology for parts of a pot — “From the beak to the neck, the shoulders, the body and the foot.”

A few blocks away at Camas Gallery, the work of Gary Wood and Judith Sanders-Wood will on display.

Gary Wood worked in the Vancouver area in the steel industry for many years. Now retired, he enjoys using seed pods from a plant called “devil’s claw” that grows in the desert Southwest to create artistic birds using various feathers to enhance them. They are then mounted onto apple wood.

Judith Sanders-Wood works primarily in acrylics and watercolor mediums and also works with mixed media and collage.

She has taught art at Montage Art School in Vancouver, as well as private workshops and classes.

Sanders-Wood paints under the name JK Sanders and is currently represented by The Artisian Gallery, Priest Lake, Idaho, Angel Gallery, Coeur’d Alene, Idaho and Camas Gallery.

The nearby Attic Gallery will be participating in its third First Friday event since opening in January. The gallery, operated by Washougal residents Maria and Tommer Gonser, and Maria’s mother, Diana Faville, moved its operations to Camas in January after spending nearly 43 years in the Portland area.

The Attic Gallery’s group landscape painting exhibit will include oils by David Allen Dunlop and Wanda Westberg, and pastels by Amanda Houston.