New to county, artist's work on display in Belfair

Kirk Boxleitner | Mar 02, 20230

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Rae Van Fossen is relatively new to Mason County and acrylic painting, but she's been building toward developing as an artist while settling into home.

Her work is on display at Belfair Self-Storage as artist of the month for March.

A California native, Van Fossen moved to Washington in 2013 and then hopscotched through Renton, Lakewood and Elma before the currents of the housing market brought her to Shelton in 2021.

Van Fossen credited a handful of paint-and-sit sessions, in which she was joined alternately by her friend and her husband, with inspiring her to pursue painting in earnest, around autumn last year. Her neighbor became her agent, and began nudging her to pitch her wares at arts and crafts fairs, including the Harstine Island Holiday Bazaar.

"Of course, I used to do sketches and doodles when I was younger, but I never saw myself pursuing it as a career or a lifelong passion," said Van Fossen, a stay-at-home mom to twin kindergarteners and a 3-year-old. "But the idea of returning to a 9-to-5 life, after raising these little ones, feels suffocating."

While Van Fossen has grown serious about ensuring her artwork is able to make money, she's just as committed to honing her artistic skills.

"The pieces I've had the most fun producing were the ones I didn't know I could do at first," Van Fossen said. "I've painted everything from faces to landscapes, a lot of them with aquatic or nautical themes, but I've also produced more abstract work by letting the brush flow across the canvas and just seeing what happens."

Van Fossen said she doesn't always know when she's finished one of her abstract paintings until she looks at it "out of the corner of my eye, to get a sense of any negative space needs to be filled, or if there's anything else that's begging to be fixed."

Van Fossen's more realistic depictions of subjects make it far easier for her to tell when she's done, even as they continue to test her skills at getting proportions correct.

Nonetheless, one of Van Fossen's prouder accomplishments as a painter, if only for the reactions it's inspired in others, is her portrait of a lighthouse with waves crashing against it.

"I've had people tell me it felt so powerful that they could practically hear the waves crashing, and feel the sea spray on their faces," Van Fossen said. "With other paintings I've done, people have told me they thought those were photographs. I want to catch viewers off-guard, capture their interest and evoke those emotions in them. There's no real social commentary."

Along those lines, Van Fossen also has made details of various scenes the focus of her works - zooming in on ladybugs, mushrooms, fish scales, coral reefs and parts of storms.

"I tried to do one self-portrait, but it didn't look like me at all," Van Fossen laughed. She said she's working on a painting as a present for her husband on his 40th birthday, which will have happened by the time this story sees print.

Van Fossen is working on establishing a professional website. In the meantime, she encourages people to check her page at http://www.facebook.com/rachel.citi, which is devoted to her artwork, and to contact her at 559-260-1621 and [email protected].

The public can visit the art wall at 23270 NE state Route 3.