A studio where art is all in the family. Or, where the family is all into art

Originally published Saturday, December 11, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND -- The Van Slyke family's art is amazing. The fact that Michele and Kent can work in the same studio at the same time, along with their son and daughter, also is amazing.

But the fact that they can work side by side despite widely differing preferences for background music ... that is downright amazing.

Tarquin Van Slyke, their 31-year-old son, sculptor and ceramist, left the family home and studio on 2 acres of property on Taylor Road and now builds homes in Portland. But not because he didn't quite share his mother's taste for classical music or his father's taste for rock 'n' roll. "More, just to make a better living," explained Michele Van Slyke, Tarquin's mother and artist-matriarch. "They have a son now."

Actually, "matriarch" makes her sound older than her 54 years, but French-born Michele, trained at the Sorbonne and University of Heidelberg as a linguist, is the painter and sculptor whose work has been the artistic nucleus of the Van Slyke family.

The fish she's making now aren't for supper; they'll soon be flying over a supermarket seafood section in Shoreline (say that three times fast!). The sculpted metal leaves and stalks that twine together as low table bases will be part of a comfortable setting in Children's Hospital.

Michele gave up trying to sell her work through studios and now works solely on commission. And there is no shortage of that work for someone willing and able to tackle everything from gigantic murals to colorful mobiles to huge exterior metal sculptures and fanciful lily-pad benches.

And although Kent, her husband, left a lucrative career as an advertising art director to work with her and their children in the house they built with a hand-dug pond on this little country road on Bainbridge Island, she has a quick rejoinder for anyone who suggests this might be Paradise.

"We do really work well together, but when someone notes that, I always say: 'Have you ever had to work with someone you could never fire?!' "

Daughter Solia Hermes, 29, now married and living in Seattle, shared her brother's musical tastes for jazz, '90s alternative and rock, but her furniture and carpeting design business does well here, and she commutes by ferry to the family home and studio at least five days each week.

Her fanciful, painted metal furniture is used by all the little patrons at the Bainbridge Island Library children's section. And she was just commissioned to design children's furniture for the Poulsbo Library.

Kent does much or most of the painting and finishing, fabrication and installation of their work, in addition to designing presentations for commissions. Such work has not only paid the bills, but also has taken them all over this country, Japan and now China. A Chinese language text sits alongside one of Michele's custom-crafted chairs in the living room.

They designed and built this incredible house and all its furniture . . . twice. "We originally lived and worked in Los Angeles, but we moved after we read how bad the smog was," Michele said.

While in California, she worked at various office jobs while Kent attended design school on scholarship. And she continued the soldered-metal sculpture that she had begun while a language student. "I was doing large wire and tin sculptures in our garage. But one day, while we were gone, a fire got out of control in our neighbor's yard and burned down our garage ... and melted all my sculptures." Shortly after, they moved north.

"We lived awhile in Bellevue, but I didn't know anyone there and we didn't like it, so we looked here. We were looking for more space ... a place to fix up. This was one of only three places for sale here at the time, and it had possibilities," she said.

"We remodeled the house for 15 years, added the studio building" -- her own heavy-metal arc welding, grinding and cutting are done in a cluttered and unheated garage -- "and two months after we were done, it burned down. I had been doing woven sculptures up till then, and of course, they burned down along with the house.

"We moved into the studio, even before we had running water out there, and the four of us lived and worked there for another two years, until we had this built again."

That was said rather matter-of-factly, with a wry smile, as though acknowledging the inherent difficulty of designing, painting and welding in the same place you are cooking and living with your husband and your two teenagers.

Michele uses her hands almost lyrically, weaving her words and thoughts with articulate movements in the space around her. Their living and working space is colorful, vital, warm and exciting. Some of that ambience is from the Van Slykes themselves; some is from the artistic and functional environment they've created and built around themselves.

Kent long ago gave up the advertising field "to work with Michele and be closer to my family. Advertising was a 'job,' but this," he said, spreading his arms across his assembled family and their work, "this was something I really wanted to do. I never really would have known our children if we hadn't worked here, together. And the work has progressed from one thing to another, and kept us going."