Public art in which faces ring a bell

Originally published Saturday, December 25, 1999

By AMY E. NEVALA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

There is something wonderfully familiar about the art hanging in the North Bend Library. It's not just the characters from classic literature -- Peter Pan, Pinocchio and Rapunzel -- that ring a bell.

North Bend residents recognize their neighbors in the art. Each hero and heroine in the paintings is a local.

There's Mount Si high school senior Holly Goble modeling as Red Riding Hood, eighth-grader Bram Rusk in a hat posing as Tom Saywer and local developers Dick Causey, Jim Nyberg and Richard Zemp in drag as the ugly stepsisters from "Cinderella."

Artist Richard Burhans said he wanted to represent his community on the five rectangle oil paintings that hang high on the north wall of the 115 E. Fourth St. library.

The paintings feature 59 North Bend residents garbed in wigs, pirate hats and ornate dresses and uniforms.

"I was skeptical of public art at first, since there's a lot of it I don't like," Burhans said. "We went out of our way to make sure that the community was involved."

Burhans included himself as the turbaned Sultan Schahria and his wife, Sallie, as Scheherazade, the sultan's wife and storyteller from "1,001 Arabian Nights."

The Burhanses work in tandem on Richard's paintings. Sallie does the legwork -- researching characters, making phone calls and arranging meetings with the community models -- while Richard applies brush to canvas.

In 1997, two years after completing the library art, the duo finished another community-based project located at the Starbucks coffee shop in North Bend's Mountain View Center shopping mall. Again, familiar faces are scattered throughout the illustrations, which depict the history of coffee as a social and business beverage.

More than 40 locals posed as such famous java drinkers as Ernest Hemingway, Monet and Renoir.

For the library paintings, Burhans asked children from North Bend, Snoqualmie and Fall City to read a book or poem from classic literature before 1930, select a favorite character and describe in an essay the setting and action. Finalists in the contest modeled for the mural.

"The community loved this," said managing librarian Keitha Owen, whose library serves 10,000 people in the North Bend region. "When the library opened, people came here just to see the artwork."