Kristin Qian,the youngest member of the Princeton University Orchestra, will perform music during the reception.

SEASIDE — Fairweather House and Gallery will open a new art exhibit, “Anything Goes,” with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1. The art show and reception will feature work by Patricia Clark-Finley, Agnes Field and Zifen Qian with music by Kristin Qian and a lecture by Neal Maine. Fairweather is located at 612 Boradway. The exhibition will run to Aug. 31.

“Anything Goes” refers the use of materials and methods used to make art — anything to stretch the boundaries of understanding and meaning of the work.

Clark-Finley works from her studio in Ocean Park, Washington, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also has spent time at the San Francisco Center for the Book, Carl Jung Institute, and Crown Point Press and has been included in many juried regional and national exhibitions.

“The push and pull between abandon and control informs my abstraction,” she says of her work. “The medium and technical stuff requires control. But the element of chance is the same to me as abandon. If you allow chance, which is the great ‘aha’ moment in art, you have to abandon control. That is because the ego is the controller, but is blind. To introduce chance, to soften the boundaries between reality and imagination, the ego has to step back.”

Astoria artist Agnes Field uses a matter-of-fact approach to painting and making objects by improvising and reusing found materials along with the paint to amplify the intended meaning. “Painting is a dark romance for me — a sensuous love of paint and materials, but also the expression of unknown meaning that always finds its way to the surface,” Field says. “It is often on the edge between making and destroying. You can look at an object for a long time, until it is so familiar, and then one day its entire meaning changes — which changes the object in turn.”

“Painting is one way of looking for the mystery that is always there hiding in plain sight, and is the price of one’s time for understanding,” she says.

Field has a master’s degree in studio fine art from New York University and is currently the acting president of nonprofit Astoria Visual Arts and the visual arts curator at KALA. Her work has been included in many juried exhibits and residencies.

A graduate of Shanghai Normal University and with a Master of Fine Arts from Portland State University, Zifen Qian paints modern romanticism that combines Eastern and Western culture.

“Painting is a visible art form, which should be understandable by persons other than the artist,” he says. “Creating a painting is not the same as addressing scientific abstract inference on a report. Artistic addressing of social, psychological and cultural issues is based on the artist’s personal judgment from life and always combines his or her cognition of perceptual and rational knowledge with techniques of image making.”

The internationally acclaimed artist has been included in many national and international exhibits and collections.

Kristin Qian, the youngest scholarship member of the Princeton University Orchestra (class of 2018) is praised as an “omnibus” prodigy for her multiple talents across a wide spectrum of areas, including music, science, languages and painting. She will perform music during the reception.

After a 30-year career as an award-winning biology teacher at Seaside High School, Neal Maine became the first executive director of the North Coast Land Conservancy, which he co-founded in 1986. Since his retirement from the land trust in 2010, he has pursued his passion for nature photography through PacificLight Images, a partnership with Michael Wing, dedicated to raising awareness of coastal ecology and the wildlife with whom we share the region’s estuaries, freshwater wetlands and forests.

Their photography centers around coastal and Columbia River landscapes, ecology and the rich estuary habitat with the surrounding wetlands and forest systems. Proceeds from photography sales will benefit the North Coast Land Conservancy.