Edmonds art lovers were among those celebrating the Thursday opening of Gary Faigin’s “The Age of Steam” exhibit at the Harris/Harvey Gallery in Seattle. According to Edmonds attendee Marni Muir, Faigin has served on the board of directors for Cascadia Art Museum since its inception.  He has exhibited widely with solo exhibits throughout the greater Seattle area including Frye Art Museum. He has also been a generous donor with his portraiture art for the Cascadia Art Museum Galas over the years, Muir said.

In 2019 Faigin was chosen for the Annual Edmonds Arts Festival Foundation Poster.  He has been a promoter and observer of historic and contemporary in the Northwest and also serves on the Acquisitions Committee for the museum.  He also was a guest art critic for The Seattle Times.

Gary Faigin – The Age of Steam

The Age of Steam is an exhibition of new paintings by Gary Faigin. A Northwest artist and leading proponent of realist painting, Faigin focuses on the steam engine as the quintessential symbol of the Industrial Revolution. He depicts trains in a myriad of landscapes and fictional narratives, that beckon the train’s history as a fearsome and immensely powerful agent of change that linked coasts, devastated forests and buffalo herds, and even standardized time. The networks that railroads created were an earlier, physical version of today’s high-speed internet, changing the world’s concept of distance, and linking the formerly separate, like America’s East and West coasts. And yet, unlike the invisibility of the cyber world, the train has a dramatic and even theatrical physical presence, with all of its force and moving parts in plain view. Faigin’s paintings explore the two sides of this critical machine – its identity as an enormous mechanical sculpture which we cannot help but admire, while at the same time recognizing its capacity to forever alter the landscapes and people it encounters.

The exhibit runs through the end of September. The Harris/Harvey Gallery is located at 1915 1st Ave. in Seattle’s Pike Place Market Historical District.