TACOMA, Wash — "I love Tacoma and I think everybody from Tacoma loves Tacoma in a very unique way," artist Delaney Saul said.
At face value Tacoma may seem like an ordinary city, but this is a colorful place where fish fly high in the sky, giant raccoons prowl shopping districts, and a colossal crab towers above it all.
At least in Saul's imagination.
"I think it just makes it fun putting things where they don't belong," she said. "Putting a fish in the sky, like it's been done before, but I do it my way!"
Saul's very first painting — at age 4 — featured a fish and they do seem to keep surfacing in her art.
"I love to draw fish and a lot of people like my fish," she said.
When we met Saul, she was in her home studio working with Adobe Illustrator. A poster of her favorite artist, Salvador Dali, hung on the wall, watching over her.
"I'm drawing a poster for Hood Canal just 'cause I wanted to," she said as she worked on her latest project. "I went hiking over there and I just thought it was really pretty."
Saul worked full time for the Tacoma Rainiers, spending an entire baseball season documenting the team's story. Other works have been commissioned. At Point Ruston there's a larger than life mural of a monstrous octopus waving its tentacles offshore.
"I think it was the first time that my art got to be really big," Saul said. "Really, really big. And it was the first time that I drew the fish in the sky. And I drew an area where things were happening where they shouldn't be."
Another mural, this one in Puyallup, tells that city's history.
"I love that it goes from nature and its reality to the city and it ends at the Puyallup fairgrounds," she said. "It encompasses it all."
Just four years out of college, Delaney Saul has her entire career ahead of her. And her ambition is as big as that octopus trying to take down Galloping Gertie.
"I'm really excited for whatever I can come up with," she said. "I want to do all of it!"
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