Sanctuary

Britt Freda

Egg tempera, gold leaf and graphite on clayboard

"I was dramatically greeted by a breaching humpback whale, and I wept. Whales, to me, are holy: song, story, and power of long lineages of deep matriarchal family bonds." Britt Freda, on the collection that became Sanctuary

Freda spent eight weeks last winter in a village on the west coast of Mexico with no cars, reachable only by small boat, on a steep bay where humpback whales calve — the same water her own mother has gone to since Freda was a child. She came back and sold her house, and now paints within earshot of the Salish Sea. The centrepiece triptych is painted over the score for Strauss’s Composer’s Aria; its title comes from Ariadne auf Naxos, and Freda calls it a calling to orient our compasses toward magnetic wonder. Dare. Find beauty. Here.

Pacific Northwest. Egg tempera, gold leaf and graphite on clayboard — a slow, layered practice; the score of the Strauss aria is not printed beneath the paint but painted into it.

Teresa Smith

Oil on canvas · Pacific Northwest landscape

Smith paints the Douglas fir forests and saltwater shores of Bainbridge Island with the specificity of someone who has walked the trails. Her work holds both the beauty and the fragility of the Pacific Northwest ecosystem — sanctuary as fact and sanctuary as something that requires maintenance.

Pacific Northwest. Studio practice rooted in long attention to place — the same forests, the same shorelines, painted across years.