A dedication, we present the Pacific Northwest Artist Series

As a celebration to the artist of the Pacific Northwest, to whom we are in awe, we dedicate our Columbia Valley Blends to their masterpieces.  We humbly hope that our wines strive to attempt to match their brilliance.  Please toast the many who founded our art community and those who are constantly learning from them.

 

George Tsutakawa

Painter, sculptor, teacher, and internationally renowned fountain designer, George Tsutakawa (1910-1997) was one of the treasure of the Pacific Northwest. In his life and his work he achieved a rare synthesis of the traditions of Japan, his parents' native land, where he lived and went to school for ten years, and those of America, where he was born and to which he returned at the age of seventeen

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He studied with teachers as diverse as Alexander Archipenko, Ambrose Patterson, and Paul Bonifas, and enjoyed the exhilarating company of the artists who came to be identified as the "Northwest School" - among them Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.

By 1956, Tsutakawa - married and settled in his native Seattle - had gained artistic confidence and success as an painter, printmaker, sculptor, and teacher. He returned to Japan after an absence of thirty years, to rediscover a deep appreciation of his Japanese heritage. Tsutakawa began to study the organic, almost fortuitously stacked and piled shapes of the obos, compelled by their public nature, the way they combined anonymity with personal meaning. The obos forms (which he was later to see himself on a trek in the foothills of Mt. Everest) inspired a long series of sculpture beginning in 1957, and led Tsutakawa in the 1960s to consider the possibilities of using them in fountains.

In more than sixty fountains designed and built since that time, as well as in the sumi drawings he has produced for many years, Tsutakawa has expressed his beliefs about our relationship with nature. His fountains are not the traditional structures in which jets of water squirt at or out of a sculpture, but ones in which the water's movement over shapes, its sounds, and its reflected light are indispensable to the concept of the form as a whole.

George Tsutakawa: Martha Kingsbury Published: 1990. Used with written permission from University of Washington Press

 

Paul Horiuchi

Born in Japan in 1906, Paul Horiuchi came to America as a youth of fourteen and found work with the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming. He held the job for two decades, until World War II brought racist reaction, dislocation, and hardship to people of Japanese descent. And all the while he painted.

Working the railroad by day, Horiuchi painted in any spare moments and eventually exhibited     in Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland. When the war ended, he and his family settled in Seattle to make a new and permanent home. Here his art career began to take root - and with his discovery of collage, it burst into full bloom. Nature was his source of inspiration; collage was his métier. Acting on his friend Mark Tobey's recommendation that he use his Japanese heritage in his art, Horiuchi expressed the beauty of the natural landscape in abstract form. With painted and torn papers laid down on canvas or board, he produced art that ranged from monumental to intimate, from fluid motion to rich repose.

Horiuchi gained national and international recognition for his work, as well as an admiring and devoted following in the Northwest.”

East and West: Barbara Johns Published: 2008. 
Used with written permission from University of Washington Press

 

Kenneth Callahan

Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1905 Kenneth Callahan spent his childhood years growing up in Montana before returning to Washington to attend high school in Seattle. It was in Washington as well as his many trips through Europe, Latin America and the United States that greatly inspired his work. He is recognized as one of the founders of the Northwest School along with other notable artists Guy Anderson, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. In addition to being a painter, Callahan also served as the curator of the Seattle Art Museum from 1933-1953, an art critic, and taught art at several institutions across the country.