Painter juggles art with life as mother

By DAVID GUNTER

Feature correspondent

SANDPOINT — There are those who live the artist’s life full-time, and those who must carve out time for their work. As a city employee and mother of two young girls, Kami Omodt falls into the second category.

She’s fortunate that her job with Sandpoint Parks & Recreation also has created a setting where her creativity can come to life. If you’ve picked up one of the colorful recreation department activity catalogs since about 2003, you’ve seen her work on the cover. And if you’ve stopped into the department’s office at City Hall, you’ve also stepped into the “gallery” where her original watercolors are hung.

“I’m coming up on my fourteenth year with the city,” said Omodt, who goes by her maiden name when she paints under her creative identity of Kami Blood Art. “My first year, I suggested that we quit using clip art and start using painted covers.”

For the first couple of seasons and the first four covers — the department releases two catalogs each year — the artist painted in the office. These days, she paints in her home studio, which doubles as the family laundry room once the easel and brushes are put away.

“My daughter, Sienna, likes to come down and set her easel up next to mine,” said Omodt, adding that the “informative discussions” that ensue can cover anything from color schemes to the blurred line that separates fantasy from reality.

For example, when she decided to use the image of a child in parka and snow pants making a snow angel as the cover theme for a recent fall/winter catalog, 6-year-old Sienna was both the model and the muse for the finished work. Incorporating her daughter’s input as she painted, Omodt learned that the sky can break all the rules and embrace colors other than blue, that stars don’t necessarily have to adhere to the shapes we’ve long come to associate them with and that snow angels aren’t so much the shape left in the snow as they are the kid making that shape.

And, by the way, mom — the kid should have real wings.

Artwork bearing the Kami Blood signature has always had a touchstone in the art nouveau.

“But my work has evolved a lot since having kids,” she said. “I find them creeping into it.”

Nonetheless, she makes a distinction between being a wife and mother and being an artist.

“I leave my maiden name on my artwork,” she said. “My kids get my married name — the artwork is just mine.”

No doubt, 3-year-old Reagan will soon be joining her older sister to make her thoughts known as her mother steps up to the easel. It’s probably to be expected, since Kami was an “art kid” herself growing up.

“I remember working on this awesome, diagonal signature on everything I produced,” the artist said with a laugh.

Her first strong memory of seeing art as a life option was in sixth grade, when she turned in a report on a National Geographic article and spent extra time producing the cover. The reaction from teacher David Sherb — an accomplished artist himself — gave her the first positive notice from an adult other than her parents.

At Sandpoint High School, she studied with art teacher Dan Shook, who introduced her to the medium that would intrigue her for the next several years.

“He was another very influential teacher for me,” said Omodt. “He was the first one who put oil paints in my hands.”

As an art major at the University of Idaho, she worked exclusively in oils until a back injury in her junior year forced a change of direction.

“It was difficult for me to get around and hard to do the stand-up work with oil paints,” the artist said. “So I got out my old watercolors and started dinking around with them again. I liked it — I was hooked.”

Despite the fact that watercolors are a faster medium, the painter realized they gave her more control over the work. That is borne out in the covers she produces for the city, which, rather than plying a filmy, “washed” course, somehow manage to be ethereal and nearly photographic at the same time.

The city — which owns the physical paintings Omodt does for the covers, while she retains the copyright and ability to produce prints — broached the idea of using the ample wall space at City Hall as a public gallery. Omodt wound up as the de facto curator, overseeing the hanging of black-and-white photos by Jim Parsons, along with several historical photos done by his uncle, John Page.

But where the historical images in black-and-white seem somehow appropriate for the austere passageways of City Hall, the florals and scenics and seasonal captures that grace the walls of the Recreation Department office feel like Dorothy’s first step into the Land of Oz.

“People come into our office and they like the colors; they like the artwork,” said Omodt. “They stop by, mosey around and look at my stuff. It lightens the mood and stimulates conversation.”

That’s also true among city employees, who have given the artist an open invitation to route any overflow their way to brighten up the naked walls of other offices in the building.

Granted, her daughters are still quite young, but Sienna is moving into elementary school and Reagan isn’t too far behind. And soon, Omodt said, she will designate the Mondays that she has off for creating art. She already has plans for a home studio that won’t require her to “do the laundry and shoo away the cat” before she can get to work.

Once she has the time and space to do so, this watercolorist plans to entertain her passion for fantasy, possibly creating a coffee table book of mermaids, creating kids’ books and accepting commission work. That point might be off in the distance and there might still be plenty of recreational activity covers to paint between now and then, but the artist can see it from here, beckoning on the horizon.

“I love my life, I love my job and I love painting,” she said. “It’s a long road, but, somehow, I’ll get to mold and shape things where I can express myself through my physical art.

“My husband, Luke, and I are working on getting me a studio in the house,” she added. “A studio with a door — that you can close.”

Information about originals, prints, and blank-inside greeting cards of the artist’s work is available online at www.kamibloodart.com.