Helen Brown's "Towering icon" is a watercolor batik depicting the Tower Theatre in Bend.

There’s still more than a week to catch “Sisterhood,” a family-oriented art exhibit at Tumalo Art Co. in the Old Mill District of Bend (see “If you go”).

The show consists of paintings by two pairs of sisters — Helen Brown and Mary Burgess, and Lori and Lisa Lubbesmeyer.

First up, Brown and Burgess. Both watercolorists, Brown’s choice of subject matter includes still lifes and landscapes, which she paints on rice paper using a batik (dyeing) process.

“I’ve been experimenting with … the paper for a while and I’ve found it really fun because it makes such a good texture,” Brown said. “I have a variety of subjects, but they seem to kind of hold together because they’re all on the same kind of paper,” she said.

Burgess, meanwhile, marbleizes her own paper, then completes the watercolor, often using her five chickens as subjects.

Brown said her sister doesn’t always paint chickens, “but she really likes (them), so she decided to make that her theme this time.”

Brown is the youngest of four girls in the family, and just 20 months younger than Burgess. “We’ve all done stuff together since we were kids. The four of us are very close,” she said.

A former French teacher, Brown, of Sunriver, told GO! she learned to paint from Burgess, who recently retired after 15 years of teaching art at David Douglas High School in Portland, where she lives.

About 12 years ago, “I was at her house at Christmas, and she said, ‘Hey, you want to paint?’” recalled Brown. “I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because it’s really fun.’”

“She taught me, and it was really fun. I got hooked and I started painting a lot,” Brown said. She’s had some other instructors, through workshops at Bend-based Art in the Mountains, as well as at Central Oregon Community College with the likes of Judy Hoiness and Bill Hoppe. A member of the High Desert Art League, she just won best of show in an exhibit at Redmond Airport.

Whereas Brown and Burgess create their watercolors independently, identical twins Lisa and Lori Lubbesmeyer collaborate to make their fiber and acrylic paintings.

The two grew up in Tacoma, Wash., the youngest of nine siblings — including twin brothers eight years their seniors.

One day when they were all of 3, the sisters — who were supposed to be napping, just as their mother was in her room across the hall — silently plastered an entire wall with magazine cutouts and drawings.

They’d quietly arranged chairs to serve as scaffolding, Lisa said.

“And the bunk bed helped,” Lori added, laughing.

“And to this day, it’s still in that house,” Lisa said.

In unison, they add, “Well, it’s been painted over.”

Though they work harmoniously and finish each other’s sentences now, as teenagers, they hit a personal “impasse” that lasted nearly 15 years.

“Being artists had something to do with it, too; that we really needed to develop our voice artistically,” Lori said.

They attended the University of Oregon, studying art independently of each other; Lori focused on oil painting, while Lisa studied printmaking.

After graduation, Lisa headed to Minneapolis in 1992. Lori followed suit a year later, though, again, the two focused on their separate art careers.

“Even though we weren’t getting along, there is still that very strong, deep connection,” Lori said.

“That tether,” Lisa said.

It was the death of their mother when they were in their mid-20s that would eventually reunite them as sisters and artistic collaborators.

“It was traumatizing, but we realized we don’t have an infinite amount of time,” Lisa said. On their 30th birthday, they met for coffee. “We decided to to collaborate because we were having such a difficult time together,” Lisa said. Wanting something that was completely new to each of them, they focused on fiber art.

“We saw each other and recognized who we were to one another, and somehow, in that moment, we instinctively knew that art could once again teach us how to communicate,” Lori said. “And it almost came without verbalization.”

Putting their egos aside, they established a studio and worked together for three more years in Minneapolis.

“It was very solid; we knew immediately that we were meant to collaborate,” Lori said. “We had established our studio, our artwork, well enough that we could move anywhere and … make it happen.”

After a decade in Minneapolis, they looked to move back to the Northwest. Lisa wanted to stay away from the rain, and land in a town with a good art community.

“It was putting that matrix together that Bend popped up,” she said.

They call their artistic process a “visual dialogue.” Without discussion, they layer over each other’s work to create landscapes of fiber, and more recently, acrylic paint.

As an exercise when they began painting a year ago, they placed their easels back to back, neither of them discussing what they were each working on. Incredibly, they painted similar scenes of their Old Mill studio and gallery, located on the second floor of the same building that houses Tumalo Art Co.

“We don’t discuss it,” Lori said. “There’s no verbal engagement about the direction or composition. We just respond to one another visually.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com