Local Artists' Work on Display in Key Center Nov. – Dec.

Patti Nebel and Helen Dodge will join forces for a two-month show of their work at the Crandall Center beginning Nov. 1, with an opening reception Nov. 5. There will be between 20 and 30 pieces on display.

The Crandall Center, the office and entertainment space of The Mustard Seed Project, is located at 9016 154th Avenue Court NW, above Key Center.

“I thought that Helen and I could really complement each other,” Nebel said. “She’s a terrific figurative artist, and I think that the mixture of subjects will enhance the show.”

“Everything I draw is from my head, I do not do well from real life,” Dodge said. “If it’s surreal, I love it.”

Patti, 76, left Alaska for Seattle some 40 years ago with her husband, Jerry, who may be better known locally as the Key Peninsula Santa Claus.

They moved to the KP in 2016. “We’d been living in Seattle for over 30 years, and it became very apparent to us that we were not going to be able to stay in the city and retire without a double income, and then Jerry got laid off. My son-in-law lives in Lakewood and asked if we’d ever looked out here. He said, ‘You should check it out. It’s all full of hippies and artists, and you’ll fit in just fine.’ So, here we are.”

“She’s always been very creative,” Jerry said. “As a mom, her art was Halloween costumes, backdrops at kids’ plays, and her talent as a seamstress. The Santa suits she made for me don’t look like anyone else’s, and part of my success came from that.”

When they got to Seattle, Patti went to work to help support the family. “I was probably doing 15 minutes of artwork every night when the kids were little,” she said. Still, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington in 1992, with a minor in art history.

She grew up doing “tons of crafts” with her mother, who was also a skilled painter, so doing art, thinking about art, has always been a part of her life.

“I think it’s also related to the time I spent with my dad,” she said. “He was a sportsman and loaded his own shells and bullets, and I was his assistant. I came to really enjoy the process. And art is a big process. It’s not whether I want to do it or not; it’s that I have to.”

Patti works in many mediums, including ceramics, but often creates abstract landscapes or luminous near-still life images from pastels and acrylic paint.

“Out here on the KP, we see just tons of landscapes,” she said, using one of her works of a bright grove of trees as an example. “Leaves don’t hold still, so you work with that.” The image on rice paper lets the background pattern bleed through, giving it something of an immediate, living quality that is more than the sum of image and material.

“You really gotta stop and think about things,” she said. “I woke up one morning with those (colors) in my head. And then I started trying to manipulate other colors and forms that went well with them. I’d love to be able to do great political art, but my art all feels good.”

Patti will often start a sketch from an image in her head, sometimes inspired by something she saw, sometimes not, which also suggests the medium in order to capture it.

“I do layers of pastel, build something up, then sometimes I’ll add acrylic paint, but you get more of a spontaneous look with pastels,” she said. “Sometimes it’s one area that speaks to me, and it gets built out. I might have an inkling, but as to where it’s finally going, you just have to keep working with it till you’re done. You don’t like it, put a different layer on top. For that painting, that pot, you’re God.”

That is perhaps the main message for the students she teaches in her home studio. One of them was, and is, Helen Dodge.

“This is our place where we as artists love to come,” she said. “We paint, we have workshops, we do ceramics. A lot of people have creative minds, and they just want to be doing something that pleases their spirit. That’s how I feel about it.”

Helen and her husband, Sam, bought a weekend house on the KP in 1989 and moved in full-time in 1998, following long careers in the film industry in L.A. Sam died in 2019.

Helen, 80, was born in 1945 in Jerusalem, then Palestine, to an Armenian father and English mother. “We were not a Jewish family,” she said, but Protestants. “My father was born and raised there. He was a shoemaker; my mother was a nurse on the Queen Mary when she married him. When Jerusalem became Israel, we became enemies of the state. My dad moved us to Alexandria, Egypt. We would stay until it settled, and then we would go back. It did not settle. We were not allowed to return.”

The family emigrated, and Helen arrived in California in August 1961. “I thought it was heaven,” she said. “I went to school, college, met my husband, worked in the film business starting in 1975. Then in the 1980s, there’s people everywhere, there’s no parking, there’s no space at the beaches.”

One day in 1988, Helen told Sam she wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest. “Lie down until the feeling passes,” he said. But it never did.

Helen started oil painting in 1978. “They were always in my head. I said to myself as I was doing it, ‘If I can do this, I’ll become a painter.’ And I did it, I took it to get it framed, and the guy said everybody’s asking about that painting. And I went from there.”

Helen works in both acrylics and oils, but prefers oil painting. “I love them both, but I don’t feel I could do a big painting with acrylic because it dries too quickly,” she said. “I’ll start sketching with chalk or pastel; charcoal bleeds too much into the painting. And then I start with the oils right away, and then it starts to change.”

Her inspiration comes from imagination, from materials, and sometimes from the medium itself.

“I love to paint on tile, on doors, on stones,” she said. “I think, well, wouldn’t it be an interesting thing to have all these solid colors and then do one area that’s like, you know, different on a canvas?”

The work ranges from large portraits, intentionally flat in unexpected colors, to pure abstracts that suggest living bodies, though she does not use models.

One of her larger paintings is an abstract figure of a woman painted in a dark, nearly three-dimensional outline against a flat, geometric dreamscape, something of a self-portrait, though Helen doesn’t call it that. “The face is different, but the positioning of the arms and all of that, that was me when I was a young person,” she said.

“Proportion, rhythm, unity — your eye goes around and around and around until nothing jumps out at you. You don’t know where you’re going, but you do recognize it as you’re going along. You can know it’s done, because it changes you. You end up loving that piece, and who knew when you started? You get somewhere else.”