BELLEVUE Two north Snohomish County artists are showing work at the Bellevue Art Museum this winter.
Joe Rossano, of Bryant, has four multimedia sculptures displayed in the foyer of the museum which is also featuring William Morris, of Stanwood, in the Pilchuck Glass School Gallery.
Both Rossano and Morris are some of the many glass artists who came to the Pacific Northwest because of the Pilchuck School of Glass. Rossano worked for Morris early in his career, as well as Dale Chihuly, but is now pursuing his own body of work.
Both are inspired by nature and history, including trees and plants and animals in their work, but they use vastly different techniques.
Rossano incorporates wood, found objects and photography with his glasswork to create assemblages that comment on mankinds interaction with the environment.
He often uses highly polished chunks of ancient Douglas fir or western red cedar wood. His selection of found objects reflect Rossanos nostalgia for the way things were done in the past. He is inspired by memories of fading traditions and crafts that he first experienced as a child at his uncles farm in the Catskill Mountains, in New York.
Through the use of varied media, I seek to express the ephemeral and sometimes fragmented quality of our human experience in relation to the natural world, Rossano said, adding he was attracted to the Northwest by the rugged beauty of the temperate rainforests as well as its world-class trout rivers.
A fisherman and expert fly tier who also builds bamboo fishing rods, Rossano enjoys crafting tools for traditional skills like fly casting, bee keeping and water witching. It helps me feel a connection to the natural world. It gives me a sense of place in the landscape, Rossano said.
His work, Snake Eyes, is one of the four on display at BAM this winter. It includes a birds nest made of strings of glass containing delicately shaped eggs and a shiny woodpecker carved from wood set on a thick shelf of old growth fir against a photograph of a deep forest.
In many of his works, old rusted tools, nails and spikes represent the world of humans next to the natural world of birds and animals, trees and plants.
Like Rossano, William Morris also finds inspiration both in human actions and the natural world. But Morris uses strictly glass as a canvas to depict the beauty of earth.
In the George R. Stroemple collection which is premiered in this show at BAM, Morris vessels are like canvasses for capturing oak, pine and aspen trees. Chestnuts and pine cones are sculpted and attached. Pine needles and leaves are melded inside the glass, with accents like dragonflies, lizards, quail and pheasants in the glass or attached to the vessels.
At the Bellevue museum, which specializes in diverse media with intellectual content, superb craftsmanship and exquisite design, Morris glass vessels are displayed with lights inside to enhance viewing of all the details on the surface and in the glass. The vessels harkens back to art nouveau artists like French master Emile Galle and to Japanese Meiji-era ceramics.
Morris pushes the medium of glass beyond comprehension. In almost 30 years of creating art from glass Morris has delved into much different subject matter, from dinosaur bones to ethnic masks around the world.
In his first collaboration with the art collector George R. Stroemple in the early 1990s, he created Canopic Jars inspired by Egyptian funerary artifacts. In this second project with Stroemple, the two worked together to plan a series of 38 vessels inspired by the flora and fauna of three microclimates: the Steens Mountain, Sisters, in Oregon, and the Cascade Mountains.
The Stroemple collection, said the diretor of BAM Michael Monroe, is the result of a fortuitous meeting between two soul mates who love nature. Traveling together and sharing walks through forests, canyons and mountains dense with plant and animal life strengthened their mutual appreciation for the beauty of Americas West, Monroe said.
Morris documents each new body of work with large, full-color books, documenting the work as well as the process. The books are works of art in themselves.
The Stroemple collection is featured in William Morris Native Species, by William Warmus, published by Belzar Spring Press in Portland. The 125 page book features 100 detailed color photographs on 11-by-16-inch pages.
Rossanos work will remain in the lobby through the end of April and the Stroemple collection has been extended to June 17.
Since last year, the renovated manifestation of the Bellevue Art Museum strives to illuminate and enrich the human spirit through its focus on the art of craft and design appropriately, since the museum was developed through the years from the countributions of the famed Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Fair that started in Bellevue.
The two glass artists are accompanied at the museum this winter with a major exhibit of wood that is sculpted primarily on a lathe.

Turning Wood into Art
Turning Wood into Art includes 120 works by more than 40 artists from the collection of Jane and Arthur Mason, an exhibition organized by the Mint Museum of Craft and Design.
Turning Wood into Art represents one of the most significant gatherings of contemporary turned-wood objects in America today with the work of most of the major contemporary North American and European wood turners.
The exhibit illustrates the development of woodturning as an art form in the past two decades, showing the results of a technique that demands a balancing act between holding meticulous control of the wood on the lathe and forms that can happen by chance.
Woodturning embodies a provocative dialogue between what is found in nature, technical innovation and artistic expression.
Jane and Arthur Mason have collected more than 800 wood-turned objects since being inspired by a 1986 exhibition of turned-wood bowls from the Edward Jacobson Collection at the Smithsonian?s American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery. That collection is now housed at Arizona State University.
Leading artists in the medium include David Ellsworth, Mark and Mel Lindquist, Ed and Philip Moulthrop, Ron Kent, Virginia Dotson, Rude Osolnik, Bob Stocksdale and Todd Hoyer.

Watch the process
A Northwest wood turning group, the Seattle Chapter of the American Association of Wood Turners will offer live demonstrations at the museum from noon – 4 p.m., Saturday, March 10.
A talented Arlington-area wood turner, Lucinda VanValkenburg said she is not available to participate at the event, although she hopes to go see the show.
The free demonstrations at the Bellevue Arts Museum Forum by Northwest artists Mehrdad Azarpay, Michael Werner, John Swanson, Les Dawson and Jack Wayne will help viewers understand how the objects in the exhibit were created. Demonstrations are free to the public
Specializing in the exploration of the fine art of craft and design, Bellevue Arts Museum is located at 510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue.
For information go to the Web site at www.bellevuearts.org call 425-519-0770.