Deborah DeWit Marchant's new book is a compilation of pastel and oil paintings with the theme of books. Marchant will sign copies at Beach Books for Seaside's October Art Walk. Submitted photo.

SEASIDE – Deborah DeWit Marchant will speak about “Inspiration: Finding the Muse Through Books, Art and Writing” at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 6, at Beach Books. Marchant will sign copies of her new book, “Deborah DeWit Marchant: In the Presence of Books,” as well as her popular “Traveling Light.”

“Deborah DeWit Marchant: In the Presence of Books” is a collection of Marchant’s artwork celebrating quiet, private, comfortable moments of reading books. Her soft paintings (pastels and oils on canvas and wood) depict books and readers enjoying them in various scenes – grassy knolls, overstuffed armchairs by the fireside and in the car on a road trip, among others.

This art book is a full-color, high-quality coffee-table book that contains 55 images of Marchant’s original artworks. The book features an introduction and texts by prominent Pacific Northwest poet Kim Stafford, and a foreword by Randall Koch, of the Sitka Center for the Arts and Ecology.

A resident of Tigard, Marchant has traveled to remote places around the world for her photography. In “Traveling Light,” she documented some of those travels. In her new book, her artwork and writing gather people to the most private and universal sanctuary – cozy moments spent with a good book.

“Books were a home for a wayward traveler, a place to rest and find kinship,” said Marchant. “When I no longer traveled as much, books were the stopover, the hovering experience somewhere between far away and home. They represented that ironic human tendency to want both the freedom to explore the unknown and to remain comfortably in the known.”

Marchant is a self-taught photographer, painter and writer. She has been exhibiting her work in galleries in the Northwest for more than 20 years, and her images have been used on the covers of books, magazines, notecards and in calendars. She has been involved with Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology for 25 years as a teacher and artist-in-residence.

Beach Books is located at 37 N. Edgewood. For more information, call (503) 738-3500.