Nikki McClure draws inspiration from Budd Inlet for new book

The art of Nikki McClure celebrates the natural world and humans’ humble place in it. She draws the places where she finds herself and the creatures around her.

Four years ago, McClure moved to a home on the shore of Budd Inlet, and her new book, “Waiting for High Tide,” tells the story of her family building a raft and waiting to launch it as the other denizens of the tidal flats wait along with them.

“It’s not just the humans who are using the beach, but it’s all these other creatures, too,” said McClure, who’ll read from the book Saturday at the Olympia Timberland Regional Library.

“They’re all waiting for the tide to rise for their own reasons, whether it be food or safety or water for breath, for life, while the family is waiting for the tide to rise to launch the raft and go swimming.”

That simple true story relates, as all of her work does, to larger themes: growing your own food, caring for your environment, appreciating the place where you are, appreciating life.

“Everybody’s working,” she said of “Tide,” though she admits husband Jay T. Scott and son Finn McClure, 11, did most of the raft building. “Everybody’s co-existing — human and animal.”

If she’s drawing locally, McClure is thinking globally.

Her work has gone global, too. Later this year, she’ll have her second solo show in Japan. In 2011, 16 years of her paper cuts were the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland. She currently has a piece in a group show at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California. (She chose to send a piece featuring a bat.)

“Tide” — along with earlier books, including “Mama, Is It Summer Yet?” and “To Market, To Market” — was published by noted art-book publisher Abrams.

And then there are the calendars. She sells 16,000-17,000 a year, and the 2016 edition is surely hanging on the wall of someone you know (as well as on walls around the world).

Locally, it’s hard to avoid her iconic paper cuts, which adorn everything from the covers of Olympia’s storm sewer drains to the crow T-shirts Scott wears regularly, and from cards sold at the Olympia Food Co-op and the posters for Olympia Family Theater’s shows to the traffic box at Fifth Avenue and Washington Street

Fame has opened new opportunities for McClure to make what she wants to make and do what she wants to do, and it’s meant she’s no long anonymous when she’s running errands.

“It’s altered everything,” she said. “It’s a constant change, and it’s a direction. But you know, I still have to make dinner and do the laundry.”

The biography on her website describes her summer occupation as berry picker — at least after the drawings for the next year’s calendar are complete. It prints each July, and finishing the 2017 set, along with starting work on yet another book, is keeping her busy right now.

Always, though, when the weather permits, there’s time for swimming. It’s been a big part of her life since she was a child growing up near Lake Washington in Kirkland.

“I swam every day I could in the summer,” she said. “I remember going down by myself to the lake — there was a lifeguard — and I would just swim.

“I’ve never really understood the people who just go in the water, get wet and then come out. I could spend hours.”

That love for the water helps explain how McClure ended up in her current house, formerly the home of the late Jocelyn Dohm, who owned Sherwood Press, and Dohm’s partner, Margery Sayre. They were friends, and McClure spent a lot of time on that beach before it became hers.

In the four years they’ve owned it, she and Scott, with lots of help, have cleared the land leading up to the water of blackberry brambles and ivy and planted it with native ferns.

“In some ways, I feel like we made land appear by just removing the ivy,” she said.

This patch of land and water led her to create “Waiting for High Tide,” which tells the story of the raft that rises with each high tide and sits in the mud during the low times.

The drawings — of the family that is McClure’s family, the birds and fish and barnacles who live in the inlet and the chipmunk who pays frequent visits to the beach — came straight from the process, another hallmark of her work.

“Nikki McClure is an observer you can trust,” Jean Smith, a longtime friend and half of the band Mecca Normal, wrote in an essay for the Museum of Contemporary Craft show. “Her pies are not in the sky. This is the way she lives. You see her family, her friends, their tribe.”

Though “Tide’s” characters are real people and animals, and its setting a real place, McClure admits the story includes a bit of fiction.

“It didn’t really happen in one day like the book,” she said.

Further, she wrote from the perspective of Finn, who took exception to some of his mom’s choices. She illustrated it with her paper cuts and with sketches meant to suggest her son’s field notes.

“There were a lot of interesting discussions about ‘I didn’t think that,’ ‘I didn’t do that,’ ” she said.

“Waiting for High Tide” is the result not just of the raft-building project, but of hours upon hours spent on the beach.

“I would go and sit down on the beach to write,” she said. “The tide would come up to my feet, and I’d be done. Every once in a while, I’d draw, but mostly it was writing, and I’m glad I did.

“If I had just written about the raft without hanging out on the beach all that time, there would have been elements of the book lost.”

That careful observation is another of McClure’s lifelong passions.

“As a kid, I was a watcher,” she said. “I was an observer. I would watch things for long periods of time. I spent lots of time outside and in front of the TV. Both of them are very observational.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2016 at 3:50 AM with the headline "Nikki McClure draws inspiration from Budd Inlet for new book."