Report from Coos Bay:                                            7/1/01


Greetings from the West Coast.

Well, its happened again! Another successful Maritime Art Exhibit at the Coos
Art Museum – our 8thAnnual – in beautiful downtown Coos Bay, Oregon.  In
spite of some pretty major changes,  including changes of leadership and
event dates after 7 years, the show did – and will –Go On!  Another quality,
well-balanced, nicely hung art exhibit at a great venue came off as scheduled
and opened up with a well-attended reception and gala dinner on June 15th, to
run through July 28th, 2001.  The exhibit has, we feel, some of the best
quality marine art being produced by ASMA members on the West Coast,
including the evocative paintings done by this year's featured artist, Grant
Saylor, from Everett, Washington.  Mr. Saylor is a graduate of Pratt
Institute (N.Y.) and worked on Madison Avenue for many years as an
illustrator and art director before turning to full time marine art painting.
 We are indeed proud to have 6 of his superb artworks (oil and watercolors)
as the centerpiece of our 8th Annual Maritime Art Exhibit.  The remainder of
the  exhibit consists of 44 additional paintings, almost evenly divided in
mediums between oil and watercolor/acrylics contributed by 25 ASMA Region 5
Artists, mostly done in a traditionally realistic manner.  

As has been our tradition for the past 8 years, we have gone out of our way
to make our annual exhibit not only an opportunity for people to see some
great marine art, but also to make it an event for the participating artists
to meet and get to know each other by way of a week-end of activities for
them – starting with the artists reception and dinner, organized breakfast
meetings, boat ride up the river, beach seafood BBQ, and an opportunity to do
some painting on location.  We who have been involved with this event since
its inception, feel very gratified to have the ASMA artist’s participation in
not only the exhibit, but also their attendance at the opening reception and
week-end get-togethers.  This year we had 18 out of the 26 exhibiting artists
present!  I really would like to urge all Region 5 ASMA members to consider
being part of our event next year.  Even though the 8th Annual has just
started, we are already thinking and planning the 9th Annual, and with your
participation, hope to make it even bigger and better than this year!

For those of you who are computer literate, check out marinepaintings.org for
some or most of the paintings in this year’s exhibit.

Dutch Mostert