First Thursday Art Walk, 1/4

Kelly and I took in the January edition of Seattle's first Thursday art walk. Our primary destination was Tashiro Kaplan; roughly one block from the Amazon.com Union Station buildings. The building contains one of my favorite coffee shops - All City Coffee - which I have frequented, but I hadn't previously visited any of the dozen or so galleries that it also houses. On ab's recommendation we also visited the Greg Kucera gallery.

I took notes as we walked; here are my favorites:

John Taylor's models at the Garde Rail Gallery completely blew me away. My favorite was this whale. The detail is awesome and the materials are genius. Tragically I see that it has been sold - my fantasy of owning it dashed.

Both Kelly and I were impressed by Mark Thompson's oil paintings at G. Gibson Gallery. His winter skies and landscapes feel powerful and urgent and full of motion. The overall effect is quite evocative and seems to tell the story of a permanently frozen land where the ferociousness of the natural surroundings is woven into the fabric of life.

Another of my favorites of the night were these wire animal trophies by Jason Stauffer at La Familia Gallery. I also really liked the wire insects on display (some pictures on his blog).

The Greg Kucera gallery did not disappoint and contained the other highlights of the night for me:

• Darren Waterston's paintings,
• Mark Newport's embroidered comic book covers,
• and Scott Trimble's cedar wood installation rocked quite a lot.

The evening was a lot of fun. Kelly and I had some wine and cheese and spent roughly 2 hours wandering through the galleries. It was fun to see all the artists and students decked out in their hipster (or otherwise) gear. The cold winter night gave the galleries an extra glow and made them much more inviting. Definitely something we will plan to do again.