Holiday Fiesta!

Jeffrey Moose Gallery, 1333 5th Ave, on the second level of Rainier Square, will celebrate the conclusion of the WTO circus and the arrival of the Holiday Season with a multi media Fiesta! exhibition featuring a wide variety of paintings, prints, ceramics, jewelry and sculpture from artists in the gallery stable. The affair will commence with an event featuring music, poetry and gleeful celebration of the end of the Century from 5:30 to 8:30 pm on Friday, Dec. 10th. The exhibition will run through January.

Chinese artist Long Gao, who is featured at the Tacoma Art Museum in conjunction with the coming "Inside Out" exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, will show a collection of "Image Seal Cuttings", prints made from rock engravings which feature traditional Chinese subject matter and images of the Puget Sound. Seattle linocut/woodcut artist Sam Hamrick will show a new suite of his bold, clever prints depicting everything from mythological subjects to landscape, cityscape and folk musicians. Bainbridge Island printmaker/painter Ellen Wixted will display delicate etchings and oils depicting the shoreline of Bainbridge and scenery from the nearby mountains.

Bob Lucas is a cornerstone of all the gallery activities. He will present his holiday genius in the form of cast glass Goddesses, fused glass paintings and the ever-popular cast concrete fish heads and tails. Returning this year will be the imaginative and brilliantly assembled "Rock Mosaics" of Helena, Montana geologist Russ Ratcliffe. Another Bainbridge Islander, Rick Stafford, master of Neriage porcelain vessels and wall pieces, will show his latest line of translucent objects. Stafford's work blurs the definition between ceramic and glass, functional and non-functional.

Kingston goldsmith David Weinstock will display his exciting selection of gold jewelry, including work with gems and exotic techniques like Mokumé (a wood grain effect created by mixing metals) and granulation. Weinstock, who was trained by a small family of jewelers who won a De Beers competition award for fourteen consecutive years, has a style that is a mix of Victorian, Celtic and New Age. Collage artist Barbara DePirro shows at galleries on both coasts. She combines a love of mixed media, applied with an antiquing effect, with mysterious snippets from photos she's taken while traveling in Italy and Mexico. The results are both sentimental and contemporary without being saccharine.