If you find yourself with naked walls or fussy folks on your holiday gift list, salvation can always be found in art. And these five locals have a lot to offer:
It’s her huge lush portrait of a pool that calls out. She actually painted it on two different canvases so that she could focus on the deep end of the pool and the shallow end at different times. To create this piece, she both climbed up a ladder and put the canvasses on the floor so she could walk around them and paint. The physicality of the work spoke to her past, of swimming in that pool and circumnavigating its border, when she was a teenager growing up in Southern California.
Her work is about relationships: with her family; with Taiwan, where she was born, and the U.S., where she was raised; and with the world around her. It's deeply introspective and borderline melancholic, and you can lose yourself in it.
Contact the artist: www.kathyliao.com or (starting in 2014) Prographica Gallery in Seattle.
Her work: $500 to $13,000
See it: “Sense of Place II” group show at the Seattle City Hall Gallery, though Jan. 3. The “ID x ID” group show at the Washington State Convention Center (Jan. 14 — April 9, 2014)
