Grand Image Invitational
November 14, 2024
Grand Image was delighted to host our inaugural Grand Image Invitational – an exhibit of selected new artwork from artists we represent in our print collections. The show opened November 14 and will hang for one month in our Seattle headquarters. The 2024 show highlighted 15 Pacific Northwest artists, from Portland to Vancouver, BC.
Over 100 new artworks were added to our print collections and are currently available on our website. A wide variety of disciplines were represented; from watercolor to 3D collage and everything in-between. Grand Image is grateful to the artists, the staff, and the community who came out to support this event.
The Artwork
Melanie Amaral
Inspired by the art movements of the early 20th century, Melanie Amaral distills what is timeless and essential from this shared visual history and combines it with cutting edge developments in modern design. Through this whimsical process, she creates art that is at once familiar and fresh, challenging and playful. A native of the Seattle area, Melanie has lived and worked in several countries over the course of her career, picking up new influences and techniques along the way.
Kelsey Bumsted
As a Seattle-based photographer, I explore the intricate relationship between humans and nature, believing that closing this gap can inspire greater environmental stewardship. Through my work, I aim to immerse viewers in the natural world, using sensory details, an ethereal feel, and a first-person perspective to invite them into each scene. My goal is to evoke a connection strong enough to inspire others to immerse themselves in nature - thereby inspiring them to protect it. What began as a hobby has transformed into how I view the world—finding beauty in simplicity, adding layers of emotion through context, light, and framing. I don’t always find it easy to explain, but I know how to make it feel.
Tracy Poindexter-Canton
Tracy Poindexter-Canton is a mixed media artist in Spokane, WA. Through collage, vibrancy and portraiture, she examines Black American identity and melding literary imagery with visual art. An eclectic assortment of media and materials are incorporated into her work- ranging from acrylic paints and oil pastels to bubble wrap and found objects. Several of her works have been part of public art projects including four pieces acquired by the Washington Arts Commission and Spokane Public Library for their permanent public art collections.
Lesley Frenz
Lesley Frenz is an emerging artist working in acrylics and watercolors. Born and raised in coastal North Florida, she received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Florida where she studied Art History and Painting. In January 2013, she began a serious studio practice while traveling. Frenz and her husband have found home in Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town nestled in the Skagit Valley between the North Cascade mountains and the Salish Sea.
Emma Jones
Emma Jones, born in 1992 in the Pacific Northwest, has always been passionate about creativity. Despite talking herself out of pursuing an art career, Emma eventually graduated with a Visual Arts degree with a Studio Arts emphasis from Brigham Young University in 2015. She quickly moved back to Seattle where she worked as a mixed-media painter and collagist. Emma's work has been featured in group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. She is a former artist-in-residence for Grand Image's studio team.
Kyle Goderwis
The inspiration for my new series Memphis Blooms, comes from the 1980s Italian design and architecture team, The Memphis Group. Their aesthetic was characterized by brightly colored shapes and lines, and typically combined circles and triangles with patterns such as polka dots and terrazzo. I have always loved using bright colors and shapes in my paintings, so combining my abstract floral Fluid Blooms with elements from the Memphis design style felt like the perfect match.
Maeve Harris
Maeve Harris is an abstract painter based in Seattle. She began oil painting at eight years old and later studied printmaking and photography at Arizona State University. Harris's work primarily focuses on color and light. She experiments with her own pigments and unique combinations of brush, roller, and spray to suggest subtle changes in light and time. Her approach to landscapes and florals is met with experimentation, resulting in a contemporary style.
Stu Haury
The “Permian Exposure” series came from exploring several national parks in Utah, a welcome change from the Pacific Northwest. They reflect the way my career in Design constantly influences my photographic eye: compressing depth to poster-like simple shapes with emphasis on textures. The series of glossy metallic water prints were taken in the woods of Pennsylvania, but is a recurring theme in different bodies of work. I’ve been photographing reflections in the pools, lakes and waters around me for years; it’s always a guaranteed dynamic composition with layers of abstraction and depth.
Van Hoang
Van Hoang is a painter based in Seattle, WA. Born in Vietnam, his family immigrated in 1990 searching for the American Dream. Van graduated with a BFA in painting and drawing at the University of Washington in 2013. After graduating, he was hired by a large Seattle art studio to create paintings and sculpture for an international clientele of collectors, architects, and designers. Van's rapid commercial success prompted him in 2015 to focus on his personal work and move into a studio loft in Pioneer Square.
Victoria Neiman
This collection explores the act of painting as if it were that of weaving, building a textile methodically through the layering and interlacing of brush strokes. The act itself of applying paint is mechanical and grounded, though I also hope to create a sense of lightness as each layer hovers above the last, coming increasingly untethered from the geometry of the loom. In choosing paint as my “fiber,” I’m particularly interested in seeing how one layer affects the other through smearing, blending, accumulation, opacity and transparency. Even the most precise paint application is offset by unpredictable interactions with its surroundings, celebrating this tension between order and spontaneity.
Mimi Payne
These images are part of a new series that delves into the realm of collective nostalgia. With an eye for vintage Americana and its iconography, my photographs serve as a visual documentation of a vibrant travelogue, offering a glimpse into a bygone era… charmingly faded yet still holding on to its allure. Framing them in ways to accentuate their shape or form, these images become both a documentation of past lifestyles and also a celebration of them.
Allison Rohland
We are the culmination of the people we know and the places we inhabit.
This body of work explores how those pieces come together to form the whole--to let the child within play and find something new and seemingly forgotten. How mark, pieces and moments come together to form not only an artistic work, but life itself. How can we play with the pieces we have to discover and reimagine something wholly new within ourselves.
Morgan Smalley
My greatest hope is that my work will stir something inside of you. That you will find meaning in the lines or the colors. That it will remind you of something you forgot, a feeling, a moment. I hope it incites wonder at the way the colors mix or curiosity in the differing materials, joy in the vibrance or heartbreak in the darkness. Above all, I hope it will construct for you as personal of an experience as it has for me throughout its creation.
Renée Staeck
Portland, Oregon artist Renée Staeck (she/they) creates a wide range of works on paper that take the form of vignettes, portraits, and abstractions. Renée’s abstract collage work grew out of an urge to focus on the subconscious mark-making that emerges in the margins of her representational gouache paintings. The playful forms, composed of cut up doodles and paper palettes, are free of the planned structure of her more illustrative work. Renée’s abstract works are visual mantras, and the finished artworks are the outcome of a joyful process.
Amy Stewart
Amy Stewart’s latest series engages with the possibilities of unity across these uncomfortable positions, finding parallels between human and environmental (dis)connections. Stewart looks at the sharp features of buildings in her urban home as shapes that oddly coordinate with the surrounding sea and mountains. She sees a random synchronicity in the competing layers of nature and development—a conversation between opposing origins that, from a new angle, feel connected rather than dissonant. Many of the shapes in Stewart’s paintings do not at first fit naturally together, but the beauty in their eventual harmony reminds Stewart of people’s ability to become better humans by understanding others.
Each painting in The Happier We’ll Be pulls together dissonant shapes with a playful eye. Inspired by architecture and nature, the shapes at first seem haphazardly suspended, but they also support one another, joining from disparate parts into a unified whole. A thin line along or across the shapes suggests the ties that unite us through our differences. Like the random good news stories from which Stewart pulls the titles for the pieces in this series, these paintings push against division, insisting on all the beautiful ways we come together, finding kinship with the natural world and each other.
