Featured Artist

Nondis Taylor

Fine Arts Painter, Sculptor, Potter, Fiber Artist

Nondis Taylor is a home grown Chewelah artist who has returned to her community roots after spending most of her years on the West Coast. She and her husband Tim Neilson decided to move to Chewelah in 2015 to prepare for retirement after raising four children. Together, they founded the Trail’s End Art Gallery that has become the hub for visual arts in our community.
     Nondis grew up on a farm near the southern end of the Chewelah Valley. She is the second to the oldest of seven children born to Carey and Gail Hafer. Nondis remembers riding horses, changing sprinklers, mending fences, driving the tractor and the truck during haying and grain harvesting season, and caring for orphan calves. Those were the things all farm kids did as they grew up. She recalls riding the school bus and how her bus driver Ray Potter would buy his riders ice cream on the last day of school. But sandwiched in between farm work and school work, Nondis had an early passion for art.
     “I enjoyed drawing, water color painting, and sewing my own clothes,” she said. “My junior high teacher would let me stay after school to work on art projects. I taught macramé classes and had a booth at Chataqua in 1978 where I sold my macramé designs.
    Then, Nondis moved to Seattle, then Portland Oregon where she worked in the banking industry and founded her own mortgage company. She later owned a decorative painting business. She still found time to paint and to earn a bachelor’s degree in art.
     Nondis has recently developed an interest in sculpture and ceramics, and she has become quite good at it. Her sculpture of a salmon is currently on display at the Art & Soul of the Magic Valley art show in Twin Falls, Idaho.
     “The hump back salmon is 18 inches long and rests on its bottom fins as if it was swimming,” she described. “My next project is to sculpt all 14 species of trout.”
     Completing the project may take a while as Nondis is a full-time employee of the Department of Natural Resources in Colville.
     “I am a Right of Way Specialist,” she said, “which means that I write agreements between the DNR and private property owners. When the DNR needs to cross private property to access its lands, or when the private property owner needs to cross DNR land, I negotiate and write the license that allows access.
     “This gives me only Saturdays to paint or sculpt. And I help Tim down at the gallery whenever I can. He just hosted a Plein Air Painting event where 24 artists completed 63 outdoor paintings over a three-day weekend. They were all displayed at the Trail’s End Gallery and the Huff Memorial Center during the First Thursday Art Walk. Over two
hundred people came into the gallery and 14 paintings were purchased.”
     The First Thursday Art Walk has become a monthly social activity here in Chewelah where town’s people stop and chat with each other between visits to the businesses where the works of art are displayed.
     Nondis has been a member of the Chewelah Arts Guild for 5+ years and a Board Member for 2 years.