Illahe Design Studio

Located in Ashland's charming Railroad District, Illahe Design Studio and Gallery is a combination of tile showroom and fine arts gallery. We focus on art and design for the home and offer a unique opportunity to collaborate with artists to create extraordinary custom artwork. The Design Studio, in conjunction with Illahe Tileworks, allows us to work directly with clients to create ceramic tile, murals and ceramic art. From residential to large-scale commercial or public art projects and murals, Illahe's hand made art tile provides the perfect solution, in terms of beauty and durability. In addition to carrying full lines of decorative and field tile, the gallery provides an eclectic display of regional fine arts and crafts, including jewelry, photography, marble and ceramic sculpture, tile art and pottery. Our goal: to beautify homes and enrich lives.

 

More information:
Illahe Design Studio & Gallery
500 A Street, Suite 3 (corner of 4th & A)
Ashland, OR 97520
541/488-5072
Hours: Tues.-Sat. 10-5

 

 

Jewelry Studio & Art Gallery

Painting of the Earth

BY ROBERT C. DOUGLAS JR.

August 5th through September 30th, 2005

As an artist Robert C. Douglas was always fascinated with the pre-contact indigenous population of the Pacific Northwest Coast and their culture with its’ close ties to the environment. Many of his paintings are based on these pre-contact indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, the Tlingit, Tsimishian, Haida, Kwakiutl and Nootka, the people of the cedar and the raven. The cedar is often referred to as the tree of life. Its’ traits of resistance to rot, easy splitting and cutting as well as soft inner bark provide shelter, family totems, highly decorated storage and ceremonial boxes, water proof clothing in the form of cedar bark hats and capes even the fine roots were used to make fine lines and rope. This great tree also provided the raw materiel for transportation in the form of magnificent and seaworthy dugout canoes ranging in size from a one or two person craft to seventy-foot ocean going craft capable of plying an often rough and inhospitable Pacific Ocean.

 

Overseeing this world is a transformative figure, Raven, spirit guide, teacher and trickster who stole the “Ma” from the Gods (a box in which they kept the sun) and brought it to earth and opened it bringing daylight to the darkness. He was also a discoverer for one day while walking on the beach at Naikun he heard murmurings from inside a clamshell and being very curious he opened the shell and out came the first Haida people.

These paintings are Robert’s view of a people that lived in and with the great forests when they were mythical and spiritual places before they became just another commodity to be cut, packaged and sold.