Art by NW: Julie Sevilla Drake’s quilts pop with bold color

During COVID, she named her quilts “Viral Load,” “Droplet Mismanagement” and “Tulips and Tombstones” — the last of which refers to the nearby Skagit Valley festival, where flowers were plowed under during the pandemic. A fly-fishing trip to southern Idaho inspired “Big Sky. Relentless Sun. No Cover,” which burns with a bright solar system of hot yellow and orange orbs. 

Drake’s recent “fog series,” muted and misty, embraces the weather that tumbles in from the Salish Sea. This was a new phenomenon for her, coming from Alaska. “There’s more fog in the summer here, because of the cold ocean,” she explains. “We can watch it roll in over the trees here … it’s really magical.”

Titles in this series include “Fog Eats All,” “Fog, the Forest, and the Fierce Beast” and “A Field Guide to Foggy Mornings,” this last based in a visual haiku (five squares, seven squares, five squares).

But Drake says the title that fits every one of her quilts is “Mestiza Goes Walking.” “Mestiza” because she is mixed-race (“part Filipino and part everything else,” she says) and walking because she finds artistic inspiration on daily hikes into the woods.

Stepping out her front door, she heads into the surrounding trees, where she feels attuned and indebted to the longstanding presence of Samish and Swinomish people in this area. She often walks her dog Buster up to a viewpoint where she can look out across the landscape and take in all the trees, all the green. 

“I didn’t know how to work with green,” she recalls of her first years in this place. “I remember telling somebody, ‘I’ve got to learn how to work with green.’ Not because I’m trying to replicate what’s around me, but because I look at it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s so beautiful.’”