 | When the Bellevue Art Museum ran short of funds and closed in 2003, the curtain also fell on a just-opened show by Seattle ceramic sculptor Patty Warashina. It’s only now, seven years later, that Seattle audiences get to see an entirely new body of work by the woman considered the dean of Northwest ceramic art. KUOW reviewer, Gary Faigin, joins us with his observations on her current exhibition in Pioneer Square. There are two sorts of women in Patty Warashina’s large, all-girl exhibition at Howard House this month: The Frazzled, and the Beatific. The artist gets credit for attempting to deal with such a range of experience and response, but it is clearly the sculptured, smiling women on pedestals, rather than the linear, neurasthenic females depicted in a series of colored prints, who are the more successful artistically. Warashina’s strength is her mastery of expressive, beautifully-crafted form, and her two-dimensional work does not rise to the same level. |
