Living her dreams

MOLLY GILMORE; Contributing writer

Olympia artist writes, illustrates new book Stepping into Nikki McClure’s garden is like entering one of the Olympia artist’s books or calendars.

Everywhere is another warm, detailed vignette, a vignette that blends the bounty of nature, the coziness of home, and the wonders of the childhood: fruit trees and edible plants, birds and squirrels, toy construction equipment piled beside excavations in the dirt, a clothesline on which hang T-shirts with McClure’s drawings.

“It makes me so happy to see my child just walk up to kale when it’s flowering and without even using his hands just bite into it,” McClure said of her 5-year-old, Finn. “He’s like a deer. That might be a book someday.”

In fact, Finn asked the question that sparked McClure’s latest project, “Mama, Is It Summer Yet?” The resulting picture book, out this month, is a dialogue between mother and child about the idea that there is a time and a season for everything.

The book is in some ways a milestone. McClure wrote it as well as illustrating it, and the publisher is the nationally known Abrams, which published last year’s “All in a Day,” McClure’s New York Times best-selling collaboration with author Cynthia Rylant.

But the artist has been writing and illustrating books for years. In fact, her first cut-paper design was the first page of 1996’s self-published “Apple,” which will be reprinted by Sasquatch Books in 2012.

“I work best in series,” she said. “That manifests as a book or a calendar.”

She’s not quite sure how many books she’s made. “What’s a book?” she asked. “To me, making the calendar is making a book. There’s a beginning and an end. There’s July in the middle.”

But what is clear is that McClure and her work are being appreciated on a new level.

“In many ways, I think she’s the Norman Rockwell of her generation,” said Sandy Desner of Olympia, who’s been collecting McClure’s work since 1997 and is on the Tacoma Art Museum’s board of trustees. “Her work is so iconic, and it has a sense of warmth and emotion and family and community, and also politics at some level.

“I think this new book is going to be very successful for her,” he said. “I expect that the next step will be museum shows.”

Looking back from this vantage point, what brought McClure here unfolds like a picture book — simple, with all of the details fitting together as they do in her cut-paper designs.

And telling her story in this moment, the ending is storybook happy: The artist, mother and partner is living her dreams in her backyard studio, looking out into a garden of inspiration.

“I feel very blessed and very happy,” she said. “Sometimes I have to do things I don’t want to do, but I am able to make what I want to make when I want to make it, for the most part, and how I want to make it.”

HER IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

Growing up in Kirkland, McClure drew pictures and dressed up as an artist.

“I might as well have been playing princess,” she said. “In my mind, being an artist was like being a princess — a totally impossible thing to be as an adult. It was a dreamlike place.”

So impossible did it seem that she settled on another goal.

“I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist,” she said. “I took a cruise on the Snow Goose when I was in fifth grade, and on board they took plankton samples and projected them on a screen. I wanted to be the person on the boat showing the plankton to the fifth graders.

“That was my ideal job — environmental education.”

That more practical dream was what brought her to Olympia, to study at The Evergreen State College, where she studied not only marine biology but also birds, insects and soil.

“I really got this understanding of the place that I live in,” she said, “and through that work, I did a lot of drawing and sketching.”

McClure also had another reason for moving here: the music scene.

“When I was a teenager, I always wanted to come to Olympia for punk-rock shows, but no one would ever drive me down here,” she said. “I eventually just had to come here.”

McClure and the music was a good match.

“She has been an enthusiastic fan of the indie scene in Olympia and was quite a rock show-goer,” said Lois Maffeo, a musician and writer and the communications manager for Batdorf & Bronson, which showed original art from “Mama, Is It Summer Yet?” during this spring’s Arts Walk.

“Nikki was always easy to spot at a rock show, because she’s always the best dancer wherever she is.”

McClure performed and recorded music herself in the early to mid-’90s, but that form of self-expression gradually fell away.

“It was important because I was expressing myself publicly, my desires and views,” she said. “As I started making more art, those dreams and desires and views were expressed visually. That’s a lot more soothing than being on stage in front of hundreds of people. And I felt that my message reached more people that way.”

A SENSE OF PLACE

After college, she worked at the state Department of Ecology. She had the opportunity to do creative work there, but she quickly realized that it wasn’t where she wanted to spend the next 30 years.

Still, her scientific education continues to influence her.

“My work is very much of this place, of this time,” she said. “It’s seasonal. The birds are a certain species of bird; they’re not just birds. In some ways, I am practicing environmental education through the work that I make.”

Maffeo said McClure’s ability to see things is remarkable. “If you walk through a field or a forest with her, she will spot a bird you can’t even see in the sky yet, and she will find a four-leaf clover, and she will be able to see through a fern to the mushroom behind it.”

The environment McClure is working to protect includes the human community, too.

She lets nonprofit organizations use her work with permission. Local organizations she’s done work for include SafePlace, Garden-Raised Urban Bounty and the Stream Team, and non-profits from as far away as Sri Lanka have used her images.

“My art has been used globally in non-profit community work,” she said. “In my own community, it’s really important. You do what you can, and one thing I can do is provide graphics.”

If her vision is broad, encompassing art and science, environmental activism and whimsy, it’s also detailed.

“She is taking a really close look at her place in this world, her home, her family, what she has around her,” Maffeo said. “Some people have asked her whether that seems sort of limiting, and I think she feels like it is exactly the opposite. It is boundless. She notices every single thing in her environment because it is so absolutely familiar.”

Meet Nikki McClure

Age: 41

Roots: Grew up in Kirkland, moved to Olympia in 1986 to attend The Evergreen State College.

Family: Partner Jay T. Scott makes furniture (and wears one of McClure’s iconic “crow” T-shirts every day). Son Finn, 5, attends kindergarten at Oly School, a tiny private school on the west side.

Education: Received a bachelor of science and a bachelor of arts from Evergreen in 1991 after studying natural history. “I took the maximum amount of credits you can,” she said. “I loved it that much.”

Home: A 1922 cottage on Olympia’s east side surrounded by a garden of edible plants, fruit trees and places for Finn to explore. (There’s even a landlocked boat complete with propellor, anchor and oar.) Above the front door is the McClure-designed family seal, a circular sign with an image of crows flying over water. “I used to tell people, ‘It’s the house on the corner that isn’t a two-story house,’ ” McClure said, “but now I tell them, ‘It’s the house on the corner and you’ll just know.’ ”

Motto: “Ariston Men Hudor,” which means “water is best” in ancient Greek. Taken from the Olympic odes by Pindar, the motto is painted over the front door.

Studio: For years, McClure had a downtown studio in the K Records building, but two years ago, she and Scott built one in the backyard. The red-painted outbuilding is decorated with art by Finn and has a sleeping loft so it can double as a guesthouse.

Some of the places to find her art: In books and calendars, on cards and posters, on note pads, on T-shirts and tote bags, on underwear (a project for Patagonia a few years ago), on the covers of the City of Olympia’s stormwater drains, on album covers and on the promotional materials of nonprofits around the world. (She allows nonprofits who ask permission to use her work free of charge.)

First book: McClure created “Wetlands” (1991), illustrated with linoleum block prints, during her last quarter at Evergreen. The book is still published by the state Department of Ecology and can be downloaded at www.ecy.wa.gov/biblio/92049.html.

Next book: The artist is writing and illustrating “To Market” (Abrams, 2011), about the Olympia Farmers Market and the people who grow and make the food and take it to market.

More information: www.nikkimcclure.com

McClure’s books

“Mama, Is It Summer Yet?” 2010 (Abrams)

“All in a Day,” written by Cynthia Rylant, 2009 (Abrams)

“Things to Make and Do” 2008 (Sasquatch)

“Collect Raindrops” 2007 (Abrams)

“Awake to Nap” 2006 (Sasquatch)

“The First 1000 Days” 2006 (Sasquatch)

“In Between” 2004

“Welcome” 2004

“This Yearning” 2002

“C2C” 2001

“Conmigo” 2001

“Ten First Graders,” monotype, 2000

“The Great Chicken Escape” 1998

“Solitude, 1998

“Sent Out on the Tracks They Built,” written by Sarah Dougher, 1998

“How to Cook a Perfect Day” 1997

“Apple” 1996

“Wetlands” 1991

Source: www.nikkimcclure.com