When Gail Gwin was still a water color painter, her imagery was almost photorealistic.

She would paint small granite rocks so perfectly defined you can almost hold them in your hand. In one composition, they are whimsically linked to finely ren- dered miniature furniture by lines and symbols reminiscent of a road map.

In short, she had complete control over her objects and where she placed them in a three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional painting.

Nowadays, as a printmaker, she still has control, but like many other veteran artists confident in their ability to channel rather than direct their imagination, she exercises it far less.

In part, this is because her aging eyes (she is 60) won't let her focus on the objects as easily as she used to and in part because she's allowing abstraction to create more room for the viewer's imagination, not to mention her own. As a result, her latest work is much more emo- tional from any perspective - her own and that of others.

"I don't want to tell the whole story," Gwin said about her current work, which consists of etchings you could almost call architectural collages awaiting the viewer's "presence."

"I want to leave enough space for everyone's own stories and feelings," she said. "Yet I hang on to enough realism to allow people in. It's the key to the safe."

Gwin moved to Waitsburg from

Whidbey Island last fall with her husband

Joe Patrick and began renovating a house and studio on Orchard

Street. The couple, whose "Orchard Street

Studio" was recently completed, is now ready to pick up where they left off back on Whidbey Island: Gwim with her press set up for printmaking; Patrick with his shop open for the business of repair- ing musical instruments and reinvigorating their owners' passions.

But don't expect to see Gwin's work out and about just yet. She said she has to warm up first. It's been a while since her etchings rolled off the Takach

Press and fanned out to the galleries. She needs her time to ease back into it. If the past is any indication, it may not be long because creativity runs in her veins.

Art has always been a part of Gwin's life, first as a youngster in Amarillo, Texas, and later as a teenager in Los Angeles. The middle of three sisters, she grew up in a household where art supplies were always abundant and long painting or drawing sessions were encouraged until the young ladies began to show an interest in pur- suing art as a professional career and parental concerns switched to livelihood prospects.

Yet after Gwin attended Santa Monica College and California State University at Long Beach, two schools with strong drawing and painting programs, she went down the artist's path happily. Gwin moved up to the Seattle with a boyfriend in 1978 and six years later began showing her work. Since the mid1980s, she has shown and sold her work at 15 galleries. Her younger sister, Lane Hill, is a suc- cessful painter in Seattle (www.lanehill.com).

In 1987, Patrick decided to open a music store on Whidbey Island, so "I had one more show at Davidson Gallery before moving, leaving behind a gorgeous studio and a successful gal- lery relationship," she wrote in her artist's biography. "It took a few years to adjust to rural lifestyle. Fortunately, I found support from an active and vibrant art community."

In 1996, she took an intensive etching work shop from Richard Stauffacher at Island International Artists on Guemez Island and "fell in love" with the medium and technique.

"I like the process," she said. "It solves two of my problems. Water colors are light and transparent but not very dense. Oil paint is too dense."

Etchings, including aquatints, arrive somewhere in between by allowing the artists to use paint colors for value and density of objects and the white of the paper to represent light and reflec- tions.

She discovered that etch- ing gave her work the look she had been searching for, "a medium that combines the precision of drawing, the transparency of water color and the richness of oil paint."

The technique fit and her work took off in a new direction. Over time, her printmaking became Gwin's vessel for her life's stories and moods. Almost seven years ago, it became an emotional life raft.

Gwin's older sister Anne, who also lived on Whidbey Island, suffered a heart at- tack and passed away at age 60. Her death was a shock to her surviving family mem- bers. Although she had been diagnosed with a debilitating disease, she had been making a promising recovery until one day shortly after Thanksgiving, she didn't answer her phone or her door when a friend stopped by. The friend alerted Gwin and the two returned to Anne's house in Coupeville to find her body on the kitchen floor.

The experience had a profound effect on Gwin and she turned to her printmaking art to express her grief. For a while, the color disappeared from her etchings and the imagery turned dark, always yearning for a presence, perhaps that of Anne's ghost, she said.

The series turned out to be therapeutic for Gwin and for those who came to see her show, "There/Not There" in Langley.

"It was a very healing thing to do," she said.

The works didn't re- flect her sister's personal- ity. To the contrary, Anne had been "a very funny, playful person, fashion- forward." Instead, the pieces expressed Gwin's own mourning and sense of loss.

"At first I was afraid that people would think they were too weird," she said about those who viewed her show. "But those who lost loved ones really got it."

More recently, Gwin has begun a series of house etchings - homey struc- tures in various stages of completion and in a range of detail from sparse to intricate. Those pieces are a comment on her recent move to Waitsburg, or at least the couple's embrace of a new home after 25 years on Whidbey Island.

The move was unset- tling for Gwin because of all the renovations to the Orchard Street house and disruptive to her career because it took the couple a while to build their stu- dio. But in the end, it was a welcome change from the wooded, isolated home site where Gwin and Patrick lived, filled as it was with memories of her older sister, to a much brighter part of the state in a town where chats and porch visits - the presence of others - are just a walk away.

And to top it off, the people who surround them on Orchard and Sev- enth and others in town couldn't have been more welcoming, Gwin said.

"People here have been so kind, generous and pa-