ARTS ON THE AVENUE - ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS

 

Leo E. Osborne

b. 1947, Marshfield, MA and graduated from New England School of Art in the 60's, became disenchanted and quite pissed off with American Politics and still is.  "Dropped Out" as a hippie, smoked dope, protested war crimes and still does.
His work is renowned, as is he throughout museums, galleries and sculpture parks in North America and beyond.  His favorite mantra is IMAGINE PEACE.
Now at 64 he is a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society and a Master Signature Artist of the Society of Animal Artists.  He has garnered many awards including such as the Best in World Class Interpretive Bird Sculpture with the Ward Foundation.
"Freedom is important to me. I do not want to be bound be the constraints or structures of others making.  Let me beat my own drum on my own journey, as I invite you to please walk with me for a little while."
 

 
Leon White

Born in Yakima, Washington, 1953. His artistic encouragement started by age ten as one of the winners in a National Contest sponsored by the Post Cereal Company and the US Postal Service. During High School he was a Mentor at The School for Creative Talented Students. His Grandmother encouraged him to live life to the fullest. She always told him "Don't wait for your ship to come in, take a rowboat out to meet it". This led him to pursue Acting and Modeling during the 1980's while he kept painting. These opportunities have taken him around the world with a lifetime of memories. But, ART has always been his true love and fulfillment.  Leon is one of the participating artists in the 2011 Loaned Sculpture Exhibits in Anacortes.  To view the picture and article featured in the Anacortes American, click here.


Sara Ybarra Lopez

As a child I believed that I would become a celebrated writer and poet. During my college years I studied to be an educator while spending much of my time in the art department taking unnecessary sculpture and art history classes, lingering in the ceramic studio, working as an art model for university classes and as an assistant at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. When I became a mother to first a daughter and then a son it was ten years before I put my hands to clay again. I have integrated these phases of my life since venturing onto the Olympic Peninsula many years ago. My sculpture articulates the meeting of narrative and form and is often influenced by the drawings of children and the humorous turn of a phrase. I am a sculptor of cast metal work and mixed media construction. My work has been referred to as mythopoetic for its folkloric and mythological qualities. Certain characters resurface in the story-form of my work: owl-woman, evocative buildings, animals, beds…however, my visual interests are abundant—kindled by a shape and guided by a story.
In my artwork I strive to join the visible world with what mythologists refers to as the mystical “world behind the world”. So I envision, feel or appreciate and, with arduous and grounded effort, turn something ethereal into an object in order to bring that vision into the everyday world. That for me is what it is to be an artist. But the effort is not wholly mine. The world behind the world advances to meet me as well.