Islanders are invited to enjoy food, drinks and a variety of visual art at this month’s First Friday art walk from 5-8 p.m. on April 6 at the downtown galleries.

Suzanne Zahr’s SZ Gallery will be celebrating its two-year (cotton) anniversary, serving special themed cocktails and small bites and showcasing three new artists. Clarke and Clarke Art and Artifacts will feature “four fabulous female artists” with a “feminine touch” and “innovative visions,” according to a press release.

The featured artists for April and May at SZ Gallery are Robert Wood, and Cuban-American artists Laura Castellanos and Juan Carlos Castellanos, who are presenting their first visual collaboration. They explained that they combined their unique styles by approaching the collaboration “as a kind of conversation between two artists paying homage to traditional modernists painting[s].”

Their work will be exhibited alongside Wood’s “Left Luggage of Gnome Island.” Wood, an artist on Lopez Island, has been creating mixed media artwork for over 20 years. His exhibit at SZ Gallery will feature a whimsical narrative revealing the story of traveling gnomes.

Clarke and Clarke will showcase three painters and one floral designer — Valaree Cox, Karen Dedrickson and Sharon Carr, and Jessika Mazure of House of Posie on Mercer Island — celebrating the arrival of spring with fresh new art.

Gallery co-owner Ginny Clarke said that the artists’ vocabularies consist largely of descriptive adjectives: determined, courageous, innovative, intuitive, chaotic, joyful, resilient, synergy, synthesis, curiosity and passion.

“These women are kindred spirits to one another yet visibly and dramatically unique in their approach and bodies of work,” she noted.

Cox will show a new group of Encaustics based on antique Chinese and Japanese calligraphy papers, called “The Way of Tea.” Dedrickson’s contemporary Sumi-e collection was inspired by the ancient Chinese and Japanese art form of Black Ink on Paper. The series is titled “Soul of Soil.” Carr, who has been painting for 25 years, will show “Crazy in Love with Color.” To add a finale feminine touch to the art presentation, Mazure will create a living sculpture of floral components to compliment three of the painters’ works.

See www.suzannezahr.com and www.ethnoarts.com for more.