Add Janice Queener Shaw and Richard Stine to the list of islanders officially deemed “treasures.”

Arts administrator Shaw and artist Stine will receive the fourth annual Island Treasure awards for accomplishment in humanities and arts, to be presented Jan. 26.

“I was very surprised,” Stine said. “I was shocked to learn I had gotten an award. I’m just an artist working my butt off in the woods.”

Shaw learned about her award from friend Cynthia Sears, who helps administer the program.

“She told me she needed my help with the Island Treasure awards,” Shaw said. “I thought maybe I would be a nominator, but then she said, ‘I need you to come to the dinner because you’re getting an award.’

“I had no inkling. I’m still quite amazed and touched.”

The awards were created by the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council in 2000. Like the MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellowships on which they are modeled, they are given for outstanding contributions in either the arts or the humanities.

Past recipients include historian Jerry Elfendahl, photographer Joel Sackett, actor/teacher Bob McAllister, musician Norma Edens, Japanese-American Community president Frank Kitamoto and Bainbridge Ometepe Sister Island Association founders Kim and Ela Esterberg.

While Shaw’s award in the humanities acknowledges her role in expanding the mandate of the arts council, she and Stine have, between them, an impressive array of talent in the visual arts – from creation to curatorial prowess.

Born into a creative family in Pomona, Calif., Stine came to art early.

“At home my family was always making things,” he said, “so for me, being creative, as they call it now, was a natural thing, like breathing.”

His experience at secondary school, however, was not nearly so felicitous. After his high school burned down in his junior year – an event, Stein emphasizes, with which he had no connection – the young artist happily engaged himself in the studio of his art teacher.

“Being there with the music cranked up, making pictures and thinking about whatever I wanted to, with no interruptions, was pure heaven,” Stine said.

He quit college after a year. After hitchhiking through Europe and working odd jobs, he settled in Ojai, Calif. and began to sell enough pictures to make a living.

In good times and bad through the ensuing four decades – the last 14 years on Bainbridge – Stine has quietly produced books, prints, paintings, greeting cards and even editorial cartoons for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He also founded his own publishing house, Pal Press.

The body of Stine’s work comes off as a fluid whole, rather than a mish-mosh, because his vision is sufficiently compelling to put technique at the service of content. For Stine, “enquiry” is key, not “art.”

“Art just happens to be my way in,” he said. “In fact, I don’t even think of myself as an artist – I think of myself as a mad scientist…”

While art may have seemed inevitable to Stine, it was fortuitous for Shaw. Able to afford college tuition because her Navy family resided in California when she graduated high school, she enrolled at San Diego State as an English major.

It was only by default, because she couldn’t get into a class she wanted, that she took an art history course, but the impact of the class was immediate and lasting.

“Within weeks I was lost in rapture,” Shaw said. She gravitated to the curatorial and managerial aspects of the business of art.

“It has felt really good to be a catalyst in artists’ lives, to give first shows, opportunities,” Shaw said. “To walk through the halls of a museum or gallery and know this is what you do – you just know you’re lucky.”

After college, Shaw did curatorial work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Dayton Art Institute and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

She next served as executive director of Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council from 1987-93. Under her leadership, the organization expanded to include the humanities and become the city’s official agency for cultural affairs.

Shaw introduced the concept of the Community Cultural Plan and planned the first Bainbridge in Bloom garden tour. She served on BIAHC’s Public Art Committee for five years and managed several large-scale public art projects.

From 1996-2001, when Shaw was gallery director at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, annual gallery sales increased from $170,000 to $550,000; BAC doubled in membership and added exhibit space.

Besides curating exhibits, she helped establish educational programs that included workshops, gallery talks and slide lectures.

Shaw became artistic director in 2001 and went on a leave in late-summer that became permanent this month. After she relinquished the gallery’s business affairs, BAC suffered increasing financial and artistic problems Shaw wishes she could have forestalled.

“My regret is not to be able to personally prevent BAC’s decline,” Shaw said. “How could it not be?”

But Shaw’s nominator points to the big picture of her successes: “…She has brought art to a very art-responsive community in a way that educates and stretches each of us…”

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Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council’s 2003 Island Treasure award ceremony opens 4:30 p.m. Jan. 26 with an optional tour of IslandWood followed by presentation and banquet catered by Four Swallows Restaurant. Tickets and dinner are $45/BIAHC members; $50/non members; $100/Patron level. Reservations: 842-7901.