Yaquina Art Gallery Artist Spotlight
Ilene Samowitz & Sheila Ping
July 19 – August 1, 2025
Ilene Samowitz is a fine art photographer who focuses on the unseen and altered realities including infrared, long exposure, macro, and black/white photography. They believe that printmaking is an important part of the artistic process and prints their work in their studio using fine art papers.
They love to started out shooting landscapes and doing black and white processing in the 80s. They took a composition class in Art Wolf’s living room in 85. Ilene is a scientist, a musician, as well as an artist. Ilene blends all of these aspects of their life in their photography. They were a geophysicist/geologist where their love of waves of all sorts include seismic, sound, light, and ocean and their love of landscape extends to rocks, crystals, and vintage lenses. Ilene is an avid birder and began digiscoping birds and continues to photograph birds as part of their artistic expression. Ilene strongly believes that their photographic art also plays an important part in documenting our too quickly changing landscapes, weather, flora and fauna. Whenever possible they choose to use recycled paper, recycled wood in frames, print on bamboo, and takes this philosophy into the field. Ilene has been showing their work for decades and has won numerous awards. May the light be with you!!!
Sheila Ping grew up in Coos Bay Oregon, with a mother who loved the arts and music and a father who loved nature. They melded together and brought both to our family. I currently live in Waldport, Oregon, but love to travel, near or far. There are never ending photo opportunities and experiences every day. Photography was a hobby in film medium. I started with 35mm Pentax and it has evolved from there. Now retired from my telephony career, I am able to pursue photography. While I am mainly a nature photographer, I really enjoy the patterns in nature and showing them off as abstracts or thru ICM-intentional camera movement. I continue to learn and broaden my horizons. There is always something new to see and new to learn. I hope you enjoy what this wonderful gallery of Lincoln County artists displays.
Yaquina Art Association Gallery is a 501c3 located in Nye Beach at 789 NW Beach Drive. Hours of operation are 11 am to 5 pm every day. Call 541-265-5133 Interested in becoming a member of the Yaquina Art Association? We offer free classes, too. Please visit our gallery in Nye Beach for more.
YAA has been serving over 130 local artists for over 77 years
