Artist Patty Rogers plays a triple header this spring.

The island painter, who has been tapped to be this year’s featured artist for the Bainbridge in Bloom poster, also has work on view at Roby King Gallery and at Seattle’s Colorgraphics.

“It’s like feast or famine,” Rogers said. “I’m pretty busy.”

A visit to the artist’s studio finds her working hard to fill holes where paintings have been sold from the Roby King show.

An unfinished painting reveals the archeology of her art. Rogers builds layers of paper on which the images, often derived from plant life, float.

The 2-foot-square work has silver joss paper – small, paper-thin metal squares worshippers press onto images of the Buddha – over a base layer of poetry.

“Patty Ward, a calligrapher on Lopez Island, gives me her ‘practice sheets’ with poems to use,” Rogers said. “This one’s a poem about nature.”

The traces of the writing are barely visible under eight layers of paper.

Rogers collects the exotic papers from all over the world.

Her studio features a rack with the sheets hung like laundry and a dozen or so round baskets holding color-coded scraps.

Yellowed pages from Chinese popular novels and Japanese papers printed with tiny red bamboo shoots vie for attention with translucent Thai papers shot through with pressed eucalyptus leaves and a woven paper made in the United States from recycled shopping bags.

Layered image

While the papers can form an attractive surface, they pose a difficult problem for Rogers: how to put to the service of her own imagery intrinsically beautiful materials that already have a strong identity.

But the artist is ingenious in their application, making the rhythms of each piece of paper a compositional and thematic element.

In one piece at Roby King Gallery, oleander painted on rough-textured Mexican bark paper, the tumbling leaves and blossoms echo the movement of the bark through the paper.

The image has roots, as do many Rogers’ paintings, in a southern California childhood, where oleander was planted in the highway center dividers. Rogers says she was mesmerized by the plants blowing in the Santa Ana winds that periodically swept in.

For the unfinished piece in her studio, Rogers has chosen more plant life. Floating over the paper she has layered onto the unfinished piece are the penciled outlines of lily pads that Rogers will paint.

The drawing is precise – as the painting must be.

“The thing with drawing and painting on the paper,” Rogers said, “is that you only get one shot. It’s quite fragile.”

The lily pad imagery was inspired, Rogers says, by a recent trip to Burma and a small pond at Hyla Middle School.

The title, “Shift,” refers to a shift in focus that Rogers finds herself considering these days – away from being busy, toward time enough to notice the both details and the interconnectedness of things.

“When you notice the details in nature, it’s not much different from slowing down and seeing the details in each other,” Rogers said.

“In this work, there are reminders, notations. It’s within reach; you just forgot to look.”

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Patty Rogers’ paintings are on view this month at Roby King Galleries in “Textures,” a group show featuring nine artists, including islanders Jason Devinney, Sue Cretarolo and Ana Orselli. Information: 842-2063.

Call 682-7171 for information about Rogers’ Seattle exhibit at Colorgraphics.