SEQUIM — Artist Lora Malakoff will be featured during the Olympic Peninsula Art Association’s summer kickoff potluck meeting at 9:30 a.m. Thursday.

The meeting will be at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Parish Hall, 525 N. Fifth Ave.

The event and presentation is free and open to the public.

Malakoff said she started painting in watercolors as a child under the guidance of a local artist in Wrangell, Alaska.

She later learned how to paint with acrylics, and by the time she was 14, she was in love with oil painting.

In her early 20s — after nearly a decade of studying artistic mediums such as sculpture and ceramics — Malakoff moved to Washington, where she attended the Art Institute of Seattle, majoring in visual communications.

It was there, she said, that she began her journey into graphic design and marketing.

Currently, she owns and publishes the Senior Sunset Times, a Washington coast newspaper.

Malakoff lives in Clallam Bay where she built a painting and sculpture studio.

Malakoff has produced many sculpted pieces over the years — her most well-known is a collaboration with her husband, Kim Malakoff, for the Kurt Cobain Memorial Park in Aberdeen.

There are other large outdoor sculptures she crafted such as “Peaches on the Beaches,” “Fleur de Lis” and “Bella” at Westport Winery in Aberdeen and “Gary the Gargoyle” in Clallam Bay.

Malakoff is a member of the Olympic Peninsula Artists Association, Harbor Art Guild, Associated Arts of Ocean Shores and the North Beach Artists Guild.

She is a board director at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center and supports local art by featuring artists and art events in her newspapers.

Malakoff said she enjoys demonstrating and sharing her techniques in oil painting that she has honed throughout more than 30 years of painting in that medium.

For more information, visit www.sequimarts.org.