Eileen brings her mind blowing colored pencil drawings to Pearl for the first time this year.  When asked about her start she says, “I have always drawn, not always well but I loved it and kept at it. It is basically a hobby that evolved into an obsession that is now my career.

My medium, colored pencil, is a bit unique in that not many artists are out there working with a drawing medium. I like to think my compositions also set me apart from other artists out. Currently, birds are my main subject matter, and I use them to tell my visual stories.  I have a degree in Wildlife Science from the University of Washington that taught me a lot about animal habitat and anatomy.  It also taught me to really look at things and see how they work. That attention to detail really shaped the way I work as an artist, the scientist in me is accurate and thoughtful and the artist in me is whimsical and colorful.

Eileen is a member of Women Painters of Washington, International Guild of Realism, Society of Animal Artists and Colored Pencil Society of America.

Returning to Pearl for the second time, Michelle takes traditional techniques of wet felting and mixes fibers of silk and wool to create hand-felted silk.  Her experience at Kansas City Art Institute provided a foundation for fiber techniques that she employs in her studio to this day.  Michelle is a member of the Surface Design Association.

Jacquline will bring her wonderfully inventive work to Pearl for the tenth time this year.  Making imagery that populates an inner imaginary world, Jacquline describes her work as:

“’odd.’   I don't know how else to put it. I think it has a psychological twist that draws people in. They don't quite know what to make of it until they start looking at it closely. Then they seem to see something in it that they can relate to on some personal level.

Life experiences seem to be the fuel that drives me. I take those experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and try to make artwork from them using my own symbols and imagery.

The fact that I was born and raised on a small mid-western farm has a lot to do with my love of nature and solitude which are reflected in my work.

Past relationships of all kinds are great creative fuel and show up over and over in my pieces.

The human condition, the big picture and the small can always influence what I'm doing in the studio. I love to delve into the psychological aspects that make us who we are.”

This is the eighth successive year Thomas will be bringing his woodcarvings to Art In The Pearl.  He started carving wood as a teenager and continued into making sculpture. People began requesting carved work so he got into custom woodcarving for 15 years, and eventually into carving linocuts.

Thomas says, ”My sculpture is folk art influenced but with a contemporary narrative, and often ironic humor. My online casinos prints are very graphic, influenced by cartooning, Old World religious art, among other things.  Perhaps my Norwegian ancestry has a say in the technical side of what I do. Then there's Mad Magazine's “Spy vs. Spy”, and those cold Minnesota winters.  Thomas is a member of Waterstone Gallery.

Growing up the youngest of four children, Lynn was surrounded by mechanics, jewelers, fisherman, bookworms, rocket makers, and bike-chopper builders. This influenced taught him to work with his hands and value the process of making as much as the product.

Read has a wide scope of art experience from Sculpture, painting and theatrical set building that helped to develop his understanding of color, shape and style.  Read’s glasswork uses a process of “Murrini”. It is a mosaic style of glass working that involves creating patterns in a glass cane that are revealed once cut into cross sections and connected to make vessels.

Lynn Read was awarded the Best Vase 2012 by Wallpaper Magazine, which he will be featuring at this year’s Art in the Pearl Festival. He is also in his first group Museum show at the Muskegon Museum of Art celebrating 50 years of studio art glass and he is a member of the Glass Art Society.