Force of Nature: Couple create artistic and healing collective in Washougal

The first thing I saw as I drove into Rising Phoenix Farm is an 8-foot-tall woman gazing serenely toward the horizon. She’s seated in a meditative pose with her legs crossed and open hands resting on her knees, her bronze skin impervious to rain or sun. Her name is Shakti and she watches over the farm’s 51/2 acres in the green hills near Washougal. The farm is home to Yvonne Yeh Gee’s nonprofit wellness collective Embrace Qi and the huge studio belonging to Gee’s partner and Shakti’s sculptor, David Van Zandt.

Gee and Van Zandt are steadily building a community of like-minded people who want to tap into their “life force energy,” as Gee defines “qi” (pronounced “chee”), a foundational concept in Chinese medicine and culture. That might be through an art class in Van Zandt’s studio or a sustainable living workshop in the large living room of the couple’s home, offering breathtaking views of Mount Hood.

“We’re all about community-building and that’s pretty much the basis of Embrace Qi,” Gee said.

Embrace Qi offers classes on a variety of wellness-related topics, ranging from arts and crafts to food preservation to natural self-care products. Classes are often suggested by students, Gee said, or taught by students who have skills to share, whether that’s salsa dancing, pickling produce, vegetable gardening or concerts by up-and-coming singer-songwriters.

There’s no official calendar or online registration page. Instead, Gee posts details about upcoming events on Embrace Qi’s Facebook page. Awareness of Embrace Qi is growing by word of mouth, she said, not advertising. She said that when people are ready to find Rising Phoenix Farm, they will.

Embrace Qi is a collective effort, Gee said, about as far from the transactional, business-minded model of wellness as you can get. Gee said she’s good at organizing events and is mostly focused on the connections she’s building between people. She likes to keep things fluid, she said, in response to people’s knowledge and interests, from basket-weaving to vision boards.

Embrace Qi, which was registered as a nonprofit in December 2023, hosted 70 events in 2024 and 45 events in 2025.

“The biggest things that are recurring are solstice events, sound baths, mending circles and potlucks,” Gee said. “Lots of things about healing yourself, healing the earth, healing relationships, getting to know yourself and the community.”

Gee, 59, is a semi-retired physical therapist with a license to practice in Washington. She’s also a representative for Young Living, a multi-level marketing company selling natural wellness products with essential oils. A vast selection of oils is displayed in her giant craft room. Some classes, like “Emotional Release with Essential Oils,” may feature Young Living products, but Gee is more likely to talk about her two geese, four chickens and three friendly cats.

Rising Phoenix Farm has a modest apple orchard and an extensive raised-bed garden. There’s a large red barn used for warm-weather gatherings, a fire pit for outdoor celebrations and a big yellow school bus that Gee and Van Zandt, 75, aren’t quite sure what to do with yet. Whatever they do, Gee said, will be in the service of enriching their local community, like helping with last spring’s art supply drive for the Washougal Arts and Culture Alliance or offering workshops for homeschooled kids.

“I support different community-building programs,” Gee said. “It’s something that I’ve always grown up with. I try to help people feel like they belong to something.”

Gee, who serves on the Clark County Arts Commission, said that although she doesn’t consider herself to be an artist, she’s deeply influenced by Van Zandt’s philosophical outlook. The two met in 2017 at Van Zandt’s art studio in San Luis Obispo, Calif., where Gee taught a wellness class. Gee, who has a degree in anatomy and physiology from the University of California in Berkeley and a master’s degree in physical therapy from Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, was nearing the end of her 30-year career as a geriatric physical therapist. After she and Van Zandt met, they explored places to retire and felt a strong connection with east Clark County, especially the Washougal River. They moved to Camas in 2019 and bought their property on Woodburn Hill in Washougal 2021.

When I visited the farm last month, Gee, dressed in warm clothes and puddle-proof boots, was busy preserving fragrant Buddha’s Hand citrus fruit. She offered me hot tea to drink while I toured Van Zandt’s towering studio, which came with the property. The 1,800-square-foot building has three roll-up doors and is big enough for two or three boats. Instead, it’s filled to the brim with paintings, books, sculptures and other objets d’art.

Van Zandt has participated in the Washougal Studio Artists tour for three years and his work has been exhibited in the Rebecca Anstine Gallery at the Clark County Public Service Center. He may reach out to other galleries this year, he said, but until then he’s enjoying exploring whatever kindles his curiosity.

Van Zandt said he grew up in an artistically expressive family who supported his creative pursuits. His parents were professional opera singers. His sister married the Spanish classical and flamenco guitarist, Pepe Romero. (Van Zandt is still an avid appreciator of flamenco and occasionally hosts concerts in his studio; the passionate music, he said, is good for stimulating qi.) Van Zandt said he was deeply influenced by the German expressionist Max Beckmann. A friend’s father was Beckmann’s biographer and owned a number of Beckmann’s works. Van Zandt said he “got to hang out with those paintings a lot,” and learned that visual art can be as full of feeling as music.

“When I was a teenager, I was really lucky to be exposed to so much good classical art,” Van Zandt said. “When I was in high school, our art teacher was friends with a major art collector in Santa Barbara with a huge Rodin collection.”

Van Zandt’s father was a voice professor at the University of Southern California’s school of music. One of his father’s students, a draftsman, taught Van Zandt classical, academic-style drawing. Van Zandt later studied art at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies. That’s where he started bronze casting, although he double-majored in religious studies because he’s “very interested in why people believe what they believe,” he said.

He said he explored yoga, meditation, natural nutrition and herbalism and still meditates every day. He said he did a variety of things to earn a living over the years, including truck driving and working as a cowboy on a ranch in Nevada, but he always came back to art.

“Art is obviously a creative process and anything we can engage in ourselves to create it generally makes us feel really good,” Van Zandt said. “It not only has therapeutic benefits for the maker and community, it has the ability to self-connect. Going back to the idea of Embrace Qi, it’s embracing our own creative energy inside ourselves that is our life force.”

Van Zandt said he’s particularly interested in encouraging teenage artists whose talents might not be supported by financially strained schools. He also loves to work with older people, he said.

“It’s never too late to start,” Van Zandt said. “Not from the standpoint of becoming commercially viable, although you never know, but from the standpoint of the satisfaction and joy that you can derive from it. Older men and women do beautiful work even if they’ve never done it before. All they need is some coaching.”

Van Zandt is a firm believer in the transformative power of creativity and said he’s “trying to help fill that void” by offering classes in sculpture, portraiture, self-portraiture and oil painting. He said that creativity is not only an emotional release for the creator, it’s also a way to connect with others, a powerful antidote to society’s malaise of isolation and loneliness.

“We want to bring people together to embrace their qi, their energy, their passion in being part of a greater community,” Gee said. “Not everyone has a big space or a big venue with parking. We have that. That’s why we have this property. We want to be able to share it and grow the community, finding people who are into sharing their positive energy.”

Gee invited me to try the “wind phone” before I left, a disconnected rotary phone in the farm’s greenhouse where visitors, if they feel so inclined, can speak to departed loved ones. It’s not uncommon to get a message in return, Gee said. I’m nothing if not game for inexplicable experiences, so I said a few words to my mother, who died in 2012. I did indeed get a response, if only in my own head. I left Rising Phoenix Farm feeling a little lighter and more connected to this peaceful corner of Washougal. Maybe, without realizing it, I’d embraced a measure of qi.

“People relax when they’re here and it gives them the space to daydream and imagine,” Gee said. “We’ve had people start writing poetry or start painting. You just never know what people are going to do. They just need that little nudge, permission to do something different.”

IF YOU GO

What: Embrace Qi and David Van Zandt Studio

Where: Rising Phoenix Farm, 3007 S.E. 313th Ave., Washougal

Information: facebook.com/EmbraceQi/, instagram.com/vanzandt_sculpture/