Whidbey's island setting makes perfect backdrop for visual-arts education
By GREG JOHNSTON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
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It also draws artists -- painters, photographers, poets, actors, dancers and musicians -- as surely as the high tide line on the west shore gathers driftwood.
"We have a lot of artists, a lot of galleries and a lot of shows in the summer," says Donna Angeline, a watercolor painter from Langley and member of the Artist's Cooperative of Whidbey. "There's a lot going on."
Inspiration seems tucked along every country lane, many of which are appropriately named -- roads such as Smugglers Cove, Swantown, North Bluff and Honeymoon Bay.
"There's Ebey's Landing (a scenery-laden national historical district), there's a lot of gardens and the buildings in Langley are very quaint and picturesque," Angeline says. "There are all kinds of wonderful places and wonderful people."
In the central part of the island, the Coupeville Arts Center has grown from its origin in 1986 as a committee of a local festival association to a nationally recognized non-profit group promoting visual arts education.
"We have gained a national reputation, primarily because of the caliber of our instructors," says artistic director Judy Lynn, who began the original committee in her Coupeville bedroom.
"We're a secret here. We're better known out of the area than we are on Whidbey."
Each summer the center offers a series of workshops in painting, fiber arts and photography, taught by instructors from around the world.
Late last month, for example, Nana Gerasimova, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tblisi, Republic of Georgia, conducted a five-day workshop on watercolors and a glass-printing technique known as monoprint.
The island setting -- close and accessible to mainland America, but somehow a world away -- is conducive to teaching, says Lynn.
"The scenic opportunities on Whidbey abound," she says. "It offers a lot of opportunity for teaching outside, in painting or photography."
Currently housed in a small building just off the island's main north-south highway (state Route 525 on the south, 20 on the north), the dream of arts center operators is to one day have a facility with a campus.
"I couldn't have imagined 12 years ago where we'd be, that we'd have the reputation and this facility," Lynn says. "And yet, I just visited another arts center in North Carolina, and one in Tennessee, and I felt like a child visiting its grandparents. Those organizations have been going for 100 years and they have facilities I hope we can one day have here on Whidbey Island."
The Langley area on the south end of Whidbey is not only a major area for painters and craftspeople -- there are nine galleries in town -- but it's also the hub of island theater and dance.
"There's a lot going on here all the time," says Stacie Burgua, administrative executive of the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, a 2-year-old non-profit group that stages productions at its Langley facility and hosts other island theater and dance groups.
"It's difficult to figure out what to do with everything going on. South Whidbey has the reputation as being an artistic community. It's a beautiful place and it has for a long time drawn artistic people."
Burgua says the artists' ranks on Whidbey have been swelled by many who retire on the island.
"I came here in the late '70s and there was already a strong, fun group of people in the theater," she says. "They're still here, and now there's a lot more. We have people who retire here from the arts at every level."