Stepping outside the ordinary world

Inspired by the Golden Age of Illustration, artist Mira Featherstone’s work is rooted in folklore and combines the fairytale worlds she read about as a child and the truths she has found in adulthood, as she paints about love and loss and imagination and yearning.

“My biggest sources of inspiration are historical and include illustrators like Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham and Maxfield Parish,” she said. “I also love the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. I remember seeing ‘The Lady of Shallot’ by John William Waterhouse when I was a junior in high school. It moved me to tears, and I still get a deep, visceral emotional response to that piece. All of these influences share this sense of archaic beauty that speaks to me.”

Working in watercolor and pen and ink, Featherstone embellishes her work with beading, embroidery or gold leaf, depicting whimsical stories.

“Before I Go” is her watercolor and ink piece that depicts an old woman passing a burning candle to a younger woman as they sit at the entrance to a dark cave.

“The passing of generational wisdom is a beautiful way that we as humans reconcile the limitations of our own, finite existence with the deep love and connection that we feel,” Featherstone said. “It is about storytelling and generational wisdom and enduring connection in the face of mortality.

”I work as a counselor specializing in grief and loss, and so a large part of my time is spent listening to people remembering their loved ones and reflecting on death. This often peeks out in my art. Outside of my professional work, my own life delivers daily reminders of the passage of time and this beautiful, fleeting existence we are all living. I am a mother now, my grandparents have all passed on, and I am seeing the signs of age appearing in my own face.”

Featherstone’s art is about stories and longing, reaching for things that aren’t, but that she wishes could be.

“I spend plenty of time in the realities of the modern world and I don’t want to paint about it too, so I paint as a way to step outside of the ordinary world,” she said. “Much of my imagery is rooted in folklore, the cycles of nature and the emotional terrains we all wander. My style (is) inspired by the old tomes of fairytales I reverently flipped through as a child.”

“The Frog Prince” is a work done in watercolor and ink, embellished with graphite, gold leaf and beading. It is Featherstone’s interpretation of the prince as told in “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”

“This is a soft and whimsical piece about youth and about imagination,” Featherstone said. “As I worked on this piece, I found myself so connected to the child pictured that it became important to me to truly give the little one something to read. So I turned it upside down and wrote out the story of The Frog Prince from my collection of ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales,’ complete with a teeny illustration of the princess by the well. Even though it is too small to read, it brings me joy knowing it’s actually there.”

Featherstone’s watercolor and ink piece, “What the Sea Gave Back,” shows an elderly woman standing in the waves of an ocean and surrounded by bones and kelp. This was the first painting she created after she moved from Salem, Oregon, to Homer earlier this year. It is based loosely on Kachemak Bay, more the feeling of the local geography than the actual geography.

“This is another piece that reflects my current interest in aging and mortality,” she said. “It is wistful and peaceful, and as I painted the woman I thought of all she had lived, and all she had seen come and go, just like the waves and the tide. I imagined her looking out to sea, missing those who had gone, but welcoming the soothing familiarity and consistency of the tide. The washed-up bones and kelp echo the theme of life and of death.”

The largest watercolor and ink painting she has ever done, “The Long Road Home,” features a woman carrying a heavy load hiking down a hill. Featherstone started this piece while she was still living in Oregon.

“When I finished the inking, before any color was added, I was satisfied,” she said. “It was nice. It looked good, but it was incomplete. I knew I wanted to paint it as well, but I was intimidated by the size. I had put hours into it already and I was afraid of ruining it. It was an act of tremendous will to put the first stroke of watercolor on the page.

“Interestingly, it echoed the challenge I was living at that time as we prepared to move to Homer. I had lived in the same town since I was three years old, and both the painting and the move felt like a leap of faith, trusting my future self to navigate challenges and trusting my intuition that I was headed the right way. Working through each helped me with the other.”

Featherstone completed this piece after moving to Homer with her husband Jesse and their daughter Lydia.

“This piece was very therapeutic for me,” she said. “In my head, she is on the very final stretch of a long adventure, will likely make it home with the setting of the sun, has settled into a comfortable rhythm and is both reminiscing and looking ahead as she completes the final steps of her journey.”

Featherstone has been creating art since she was very young and painting extensively over the past decade. She took a couple of art electives in high school and during her undergraduate studies in college. Wary of making her art public and actively resisting the urge to study art or to make a career out of it, she majored in American Sign Language and linguistics and went on to study rehabilitation and mental health counseling in grad school.

Ten years ago, she began experimenting with watercolor painting.

“It was the first medium I had ever used that felt alive,” she said. “Watercolor has personality. It pushes back. It doesn’t stay where you place it but flows and blends and moves even after you put it down. I love it because it is so unique. You really have to treat watercolor as a collaborator rather than as a tool.

“Combining it with pen and ink allowed me to blend my love of drawing with this exciting new medium. Adding embellishments like beading or gold leaf was a way I found to keep a piece feeling alive and dynamic even after the watercolor dries.”

Stepping outside of her comfort zone, Featherstone has been sharing her work publicly over the past several years, at first starting an Instagram account and then putting a piece in a community art show. Through this, she has found the process of sharing her work to be an intimate, tender and rewarding process. These paintings are part of a larger body of work she is exhibiting at Hooligan Tattoo in Anchor Point.

“My art is precious, even sacred, to me, and the vulnerability of letting others in felt insurmountable early on,” she said. “Every stage of visibility since has been a repetition of this struggle. I had a few pieces in art shows in Salem and here, and I had a booth at the Homer Renaissance Faire and now have my first solo show at Hooligan. Every time it has been so gratifying and uplifting at the end, but every time I have to rally my courage to do it.”

Working in her studio, which is the front room of her family’s apartment, at any given time, she is working on three or four watercolor paintings, often painting from sketches she previously drew. Some of her pieces take just a couple of days to complete and others, like “The Long Road Home,” are the result of many months of work. For her, the joy of creating is also a compulsion to create.

“Sometimes there is joy, other times there is release or relief or simple introspection,” she said. “It is grounding for me in the same way that standing beside the ocean is grounding. It brings me to a single focus that is all-encompassing.

“And I love the act of creating something, of literally bringing it into being. My daughter is my biggest cheerleader, and she will sit and draw or paint with me sometimes. Finding uninterrupted time can be hard these days, but not painting has never been an option, so I am learning to take interruption in stride, and to carve out regular times for creativity.”

In the nearly seven months since she moved to Homer, Featherstone has found her color palettes shifting to reflect the colors she sees around her, like in “What the Sea Gave Back.” She is currently challenging herself to capture the northern lights in watercolor.

With the success of her work at Hooligan Tattoo and the support of the community, Featherstone would like to continue to show her work, including having prints and cards in local galleries and stores, in a purposeful shift to more actively sharing her work with others.

“I want to show up unapologetically as an artist rather than nurturing that side of me in secret,” she said. “The business end of things, the public-facing marketing part of art … that is what I find the most daunting, where I have to take a part of myself that feels so sacred and archaic and precious into a world that feels modern and fast-moving and risky and exposed.

“My goal is to make peace with that odd juxtaposition because on the human side of things, I love sharing my art. I love connecting with others through my art, so I think it’s time for me to be brave.”

Through her art, Featherstone strives to showcase what she sees as the stories that humans have always used to reflect deep truths. Find her current body of work on display through December at Hooligan Tattoo, in the Coastal Realty building located at the intersection of Sterling Highway and North Fork Road in Anchor Point. Find her online on Instagram @mirafeatherstone.