Malini Gupta
While most people just see letters as a way to form words, book artist Malini Gupta sees them as art.
Hilde Morin
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
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.
Craig Windom
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.”
Tomasz Misztal
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.”
Nicky Falkenhayn
In school, metal artist Nicky Falkenhayn figured out she didn’t have to choose between art and sport. “As a young adult, I was torn between going to art school or doing sports,” she says. “I decided to do sports first because when I got older I could do art, but when I got older sports would be harder.”
Baba Wague Diakite
For storyteller and ceramic artist Baba Wague Diakite, art began at home in the Republic of Mali in Western Africa. “I grew up in a very small town, where my education began through storytelling,” he says. “My grandmother said you needed to be educated before you went to school, and she believed her stories delivered an understanding that nothing else could. Her stories were the beginning of my artistic life.”
Richard Glenn
Richard Glenn never expected to become an award-winning artist. “I was the proverbial child who could not color within the lines, so I was steered away from the visual arts,” he says.
Karma Lloyd and Bill Simmons
“There are a lot of connections between furniture and sculpture, such as the importance of the finish details and the need to be accurate,” Karma Lloyd and Bill Simmons create Organic Industrial style furniture, so called because of the combination of wood and metal.
Gloria Kelman
Gloria Kelman creates works of art with silver clay. It doesn’t feel like silver when you’re shaping it,” she says. “But, when you’re done there’s this A-Ha! moment when you take it out of the kiln and hear that metal clink.”
