Kasey Koski's real art? Art for everybody!

Kasey Koski’s creativity colors just about every domestic and professional move she makes, and over the years it’s moved her art from personal to studio-scale to public.

- SUSAN LAGSDIN

“I call it CCD — my ‘creative compulsive disorder,’” She said. “My friend calls it my ‘superpower.’”

Here’s what her personal art looks like. Stored in an apple crate in Kasey Koski’s home studio are 20 years’ worth of spiral-bound journals, a rich multimedia assemblage. Each one is chock-full to bursting with sketches and swatches, inklings and epigrams, poems, plans, clippings, watercolor studies, doodles, and diagrams.

In total, they are an almost complete portrait of the artist.

Kasey told her husband Zeb if the house is on fire, the journals go out the window before she does.

“It’s almost frightening to me to see a blank page,” said the Wenatchee artist. “I started tracking ideas in my college art classes, and now the journals become more of a personal record. I circle back to them sometimes for ideas, or to support new projects.”

That’s the private life of her artist's brain.

What she does in her public life as an artist almost always symbolizes or enhances the coming together of people. Serving the larger good with volunteerism was a family imperative in her strongly Finnish Michigan hometown, and she said, “It’s even more necessary today… there’s such a decline in neighborliness in today’s technology-oriented world.”