Arctic ships series, envelope art on display in Palmer

PALMER — Madd Matters, 1088 South Colony Way, will show the artwork of two very different local artists this month.

Hanging is work by artists Kellie Coulson and Sharen AK Harris.

Harris is proficient in several mediums, but this show is primarily oil painting with a few from her arctic ships series. She uses a limited and cold palette to capture the hardship and exhilaration of the days of discovery and whaling in 18th- and 19th-century Alaska. Every painting tells a story.

Harris is particularly suited to telling the whaling story. She was born in Lynn, Mass., the Nahant Bay home to seafarers and merchants of the sea. Her first commercial art was carving ivory scrimshaw.

She became known as a muralist and had a career painting municipal buildings in the Boston area. She also is certified by the National Society of Decorative Painters and is an expert in trompe l’oiel, which is reflected in her wonderful and whimsical “birch” stand pipe covers. Some of that ability to convey the essence of an object and stimulate a feeling with a brush stroke seems to have grown from her earlier work. All that is to say she has been an artist all her life and has paid her dues.

Sharen is a true American painter with studios in Massachusetts, Arizona and right here in the Valley in Meadow Lakes. She also offers workshop classes and has two offerings in October. If you are interested in fine art with a poetic romanticism, the works of Sharen AK Harris shouldn’t be missed.

For Coulson, it might have been the bite of postage stamp glue that led her to create this show, which features a series of pieces she created on envelopes.

“I used to love the taste of stamps from the old days. My mom would let me lick them. It was a tacky, sweet flavor,” she said.

Coulson uses pastels to create elaborate and colorful stories on envelopes and then mails them. She carefully chooses stamps that are part of the art piece and has been known to spend hours picking the perfect stamp. Sometime her stamps aren’t in the upper left corner, which means she isn’t always welcome at the Palmer Post Office.

She tells the important part of the story best herself.

“I get stuck on my own envelopes,” she said. “Especially my daughter Tia, but often it is me and my own mom when I was still cute. My mom read to me. She would read everything from Highlights for Children (her friend Bonnie wrote a story about me and published it in that magazine in 1975) to World Magazine, to all kinds of new magazines. She even bought tabloids. My mom hated the tabloids, but she’d read to me the stories about aliens and Bat Boy and Liz Taylor’s husbands, often laughing and telling me what made a story bad. She also read the better magazines and we’d do the crosswords or games in them.

“I have an envelope that is similar to one that I did for my mom in 2011 for Mothers Day, of a mom reading to her little girl. My mom doesn’t want gifts from me unless I make them, but I know that she loves most the memories that I write to her. I hope my own kids have similar recollections.”

Coulson is first and foremost a mom, and you can see she puts a lot of love into her work. Her paintings are far from childish; they are real art. They are exquisite lyrical compositions. In fact, Kellie will often talk of the particular sound a pastel or charcoal will make as it passes over the paper. The music shows in her work.