alissa davies at isabel rucker

Pinedale has got it going on. The town should get an award for most vibrant small arts community. Through pluck and camaraderie, a handful of Pinedale artists have made themselves a force to be reckoned with and made their town an inviting destination for artists outside the town to show.

Starting today, I’ll be waxing poetic about Pinedale in a series of posts. Our first stop is silversmith and painter Isabel Rucker. Isabel hails from San Francisco. She has participated in “Exquisite Animal” at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Her 2009 graphic novel, “Unfurling,” drawn on three 150 foot rolls of paper, was exhibited at the SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. She owns Isabel Rucker Jewelry & Gallery in Pinedale.

Isabel regularly invites artists to exhibit on the walls of her shop. Her current artist is Culture Front’s own Alissa Davies. For the show, Alissa pushed her familiar pods in a new direction, using paper clay, and including sculpted tubular structures that look like underwater reeds or coral. She also created a series of abstract paintings that play with the pod shape, now morphing into eggs, seeds, potent nebula of possibility. Alissa is seven months pregnant and theme of life storing up and bursting forth is topmost in her mind, as her sensual artwork suggests.