Artist Deborah Van Tuinen

I gathered inspiration for the penthouse pictured below from Artist Deborah Van Tuinen's work "Sky Fire".


As the saying goes it's a small, small world...I exercise at a studio down town and several months ago a new woman came into the studio. I ran into this "new woman" while walking along the water front. We said "Hey lets walk together sometime!" She gave me a slip of paper with her name and number on it I folded up the piece of paper and filed it in a safe place hoping to walk sometime soon. We continued to run into each other at our work outs. Yesterday Deborah said " Are you going to First Thursday? I am an artist and am showing at Butters Gallery." As an interior designer I have purchased many pieces of art on behalf of my client's through Butters ....and Butters Gallery was sooo very kind to loan me the lion's share of artwork for my show home in the Encore for the Street of Dreams... one of which was Deborah Van Tuinen's pieces called Sky fire! ( Sky fire is available at Butters Gallery.) Deborah is one of my favorite artists and I am so thrilled to meet her and hope to walk with her very soon!


Article below written by BY ALYSSA ROSSO
Van Tuinen knew at age five that she wanted to become an artist. Chasing her dream, she studied art at the Byam Shaw Arts Academy in London and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington. She has worked with internationally known artists in Japan, and glass artist Dale Chihuly asked Van Tuinen to teach him printmaking for a collaborative effort with the Seattle Opera.
Van Tuinen attributes her enhanced technical skills and depth of experience to her widespread background. “My art is my life,” she explains. “All that I experience and see becomes part of my work. How I respond physically, spiritually, and intellectually to my environment is the essence of my work.” Her portfolio details her creative history, which encompasses media as diverse as paintings on canvas and clayboard, etchings, monotypes, Japanese woodblock prints, and tile.


Van Tuinen’s landscapes translate nature’s inspiring vistas into vibrant impressions of color and texture. While her landscapes are reminiscent of the work of classic impressionists, Van Tuinen has built upon the rules established by traditional impressionism. She pushes the envelope of landscape art farther toward the abstract with her work, often causing the viewer to question where reality ends and fantasy begins.
Rather than using oil on canvas, Van Tuinen works with oil encaustic on wood. This technique suspends the pigments in beeswax and damar resin, which is added to the wax as a hardening agent and gives the paintings a rich, glasslike sheen when buffed. An ancient technique, encaustic can encapsulate and preserve the vibrant colors and flowing brushwork for centuries to come.


Van Tuinen adds pearlescence to some of her encaustics to enhance and hone their reflective quality. This pearlescence captures and further defines the peaks and valleys created by the encaustic layers. Then Van Tuinen often washes the entire piece in oil stick to give it one last layer of shine.