Windows and Wings: Cate Strom, Cary Latham Weigand, and Inger Jorgensen

Cate Strom was born into a family of writers, musicians and painters.  Her artistic talents appeared at a very early age.  ''I don’t remember a time I didn’t have crayons in my hand,'' she says.  Cate was raised in France by her mother, spending her formative years living in Paris, the French countryside and on the Riviera.  She was deeply inspired by the art and history there but it was a trip to Italy while in her early twenties  that changed her life forever.  ''Being in Florence was the first artistic awakening I had ever experienced,'' Cate says.  ''I had lived in France and seen many beautiful things there but nothing like what I saw in Florence.''  Moved by the richness of the architecture, Cate followed her calling and moved to Boston to pursue her studies at the Massachusetts College of Art.  Her travels to India, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Italy, France and Jerusalem continue to inspire much of the poetic, architectural, historical and spiritual imagery infused in her compelling mixed-media works.

Cary Lathan Weigand earned both BFA and MFA from the University of Hawaii.  In  2006 she received a grant award from The George Sugarman Foundation and has been featured on Oregon Art Beat and published in Ceramics Technical.  Influenced by an oceanic divide of east and west, Cary says her story is a marriage between the mass of clay and the brush stroke of paint.  ''Ceramics remind me of the fragility of life,'' she says. ''These figures come alive for me, they hold stories, and they resurrect life into the inanimate object.''

Bohemia Gallery co-owner Inger Jorgensen says that art is ''the thread that weaves my life together.''  A prolific painter, Inger has been gaining international notoriety and was recently selected to travel to the Netherlands for Schildersweek, a worldwide painters workshop that chooses only a select group of artists from around the world to participate.  "It helped me to gain insight into my deepest passion as an artist,'' she says of the conference which culminated in a meeting with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende.

Windows and Wings runs through September. There will be an artist reception during the First Friday Artwalk on September 4th as well as a performance by legendary guitarist Jeff Pevar and wine by Liquid Assets.