While most people just see letters as a way to form words, book artist Malini Gupta sees them as art.

Hilde Morin’s quilts aren’t based on traditional patterns with repetition and symmetry. “My work is very improvised,” she says. “I have a general idea of what I want, but it changes quite a bit while I’m working.”

Marjin Wall took up woodworking because she needed furniture for the house she moved into to attend Reed College in Portland in the 1970s. “I didn’t own any furniture, so I signed up for a wood projects class at Portland Community College so that I could make a desk for myself,” she says.

For furnituremaker Craig Windom, it’s all about the wood. “I love old wood,” he says. “I love searching for it. It’s usually wood that has a certain patina or grain. It may have been real weathered and beaten up and had some nails in it, but I can see the potential in it. I clean it up and it becomes a beautiful piece of wood.”

You can take an artist out of his hometown, but you can’t always take the hometown out of the artist. “I was born in a little town in Poland called Zamosc,” says Tomasz Misztal. “It’s an Italian Renaissance town: An Italian architect designed the architecture as a twin town to Padua, Italy. I just realized about 10 years ago how that little place explains the Renaissance tones in my art.”