Capturing The Market -- Artist's Works Change With Pike Place -- 16 Years, Hundreds Of Scenes And Joy Always

Many of the views of Seattle that tourists take back to Minneapolis or Stuttgart are Seattle as seen through Sarah Clementson's blue eyes.

For 16 years, Clementson has been painting the Pike Place Market and other Seattle scenes, and selling her works from a stall at the Market.

Her images are almost photographic in their attention to detail, yet also express joy in the brightness of her colors, which sometimes make Seattle look nearly Mediterranean.

Clementson and her husband, Michael Yaeger, operate Studio Solstone Ltd. behind DeLaurenti's grocery in the Market. The studio carries only Clementson's work, and there is a lot of it - hundreds of originals made into thousands of copies.

Framed watercolors, postcards, calendars, note cards spill out of the tiny space, splashing the atrium with colors.

Yaeger comes up with products and Clementson does the bookkeeping ("I hate it") and artwork.

Each year since they moved to Seattle in 1979, the couple have produced a calendar featuring Clementson's Market scenes. They print about 15,000 copies of the calendar a year.

Clementson's Market watercolors are full of detail and of people and objects that are meaningful to her. In the background of the Market scene on the 1996 calendar cover, a ferry heads into port. It is the Walla Walla, which carries the couple on their way to and from their Poulsbo home.

In the painting, one of the cars parked on the street in front of the Market is Clementson's Volkswagen. Next to it is Yaeger behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo.

The cars match their personalities. Yaeger is outgoing and talkative, a fixture in Market politics, while Clementson is so quiet as to almost disappear.

As she sits talking about her life, her arms are folded, hugging the purse on her lap to her body. Her answers are brief and unembellished with the detail that is so important in her paintings. But when the subject changes and she is talking about her art, she sits forward and frees her arms.

The pattern holds when Clementson is at work. She tries to disappear when she paints, parking her stool in the least obtrusive place and sitting quietly for hours as she captures a scene over a few days.

"She's such a quiet person that you often don't realize she is there," says Pam Audette, longtime Market merchant and executive director of the Pike Place Market Merchants' Association.

"She is really one of the most calm, peaceful, delightful people," says Audette, who has known Clementson for 11 years. "Her work is cheery and bright. It leaves me with a happy feeling."

The Market is what drew Clementson and Yaeger to Seattle after years of living in Europe. It seemed the perfect place to make a living doing what they love: art.

"I remember as a child going into a museum and seeing a painting I liked and getting so excited," Clementson says. "I'm happiest when I'm painting."

Her father, an editor for Science Digest, got her work into the magazine when she was a teenager. It was a tiny drawing of a rabbit with a lily that illustrated a short piece about Easter, but it was thrilling for Clementson.

Later came a practical degree in interior design from the University of Michigan, then three years working in a New York department store. But Clementson kept painting.

While she was being trained by the department store, she was assigned for a time to a small art gallery. Her supervisor let Clementson hang one of her paintings. She remembers being terrified when an man came in and wanted to buy it. Her supervisor was away and Clementson handled the sale. It convinced her she had a talent other people might appreciate.

She took her savings, about $500, and headed to Europe to get inspired. "When you want something and you're young, you make it happen."

At 23, Clementson landed in Paris, decided after a few days she didn't like it and struck out for Rome. She fell in love with Italy. And fell in love in Italy.

Yaeger was acting in a movie in Rome. They met by chance through a mutual acquaintance. Sparks flew, Clementson says.

She'd already been working in Italy for two years, doing office jobs for an American financial firm. A year later, they decided to marry and start a new life in Spain, where they would spend the next eight years, and where their son and daughter were born.

They lived in a small village and earned their way by painting stones.

"The beach in the village where we lived was all stones, so tourists would go to beaches in neighboring villages. But the stones were so beautiful." Clementson decided to do paintings on the smooth stones - mostly animals in acrylic, mostly owls.

They called their business Solstone. Sol is "sun" in Spanish.

When they decided to return to the United States, they picked Seattle because Yaeger grew up here and remembered the public market.

Clementson has painted the Market from from just about every angle and in every season. "There is an energy in the Market; it is constantly changing."

Still, she concedes, there are limits to anything. She has been spending more time painting other places. She loves architecture and for some time has been painting old buildings, particularly ones that might someday disappear.

The current calendar has many Market scenes, but it also has a view of Poulsbo; a 1920s gasoline station in Seattle, which sits on land that's up for sale; and the Olympia Farmers Market, which is selling her watercolors to raise money for its relocation.

Clementson, 53, says one of these days, when she's too old to sit outdoors and paint for five hours at a stretch, she might switch to painting flowers. Gardening is her second passion.

"I'm very fortunate to be able to live doing what I enjoy," she says, and her work reflects that happiness. She even admits she "puts a little more blue in the sky than there really is in Seattle."