By Jackson Parr
"I love making you feel like you are there, like you can put your feet in the water," Sarah Koehler comments on her painting and photography sitting at a bar table in the Baileys Harbor Cornerstone Pub.
The pub shows a number of Koehler's food photographs, saturated with realism while hinting at dashes of abstract expressionism. It's not the kiwi itself, but the tiny hairs on its skin. It's not the swing in the front yard, but the way the rope is tangled so as to set the swing at a strange angle.
Koehler has always enjoyed dragging two mediums and techniques through the artistic mud, setting them together to create something new, yet her path to art was an uncommon one.
Growing up in Wilmington, Ill., Koehler spent summers with her grandparents on Washington Island working odd jobs - everything from bussing at Karly's Bar to being the golf course beer cart girl. Since settling into life along the peninsula, she does not hold back from citing the difference between the island and the peninsula.