Ava Richey has uncorked a magic bottle of inspiration, and we are all invited to partake.

Last year, tickled by a public television story on Oregon Art Beat, she devised an exchange project between writers and painters. Called A.W.E. (artists/writers/exchange), the result is a rich and exciting display of more than 80 paintings and written works. The show opened last Sunday at Southern Coos Hospital & Health Center, 900 11th St., SE, Bandon, and will run through Nov. 30.

Richey’s initial call to artists went out last December. In April, the respondents were each asked to submit a completed poem or painting. Pouring over the submissions, she applied the principles of “serendipity and synchronicity,” assigning poems to painters and paintings to writers. She asked each to produce an “inspired piece.” The deadline was Aug. 31.

The resultant show is a masterful exploration of the artistic process: a cocktail of culture and technique and intuition, stirred by the constraints of time and generously served up to the public.

You can breeze through the show quite quickly, enjoying a rainbow feast on lobby and hallway walls, or you can allow yourself to be captured by the art. See a painting, pause, feel and conclude, and then read the poem. And then, read what the artist had to say about the ways in which the original art informed the new art. Here’s how it works. An original poem that inspired a painting has been printed on cream-colored paper. Look at that first, then look at the painting. And then, enjoy the cherry in Richey’s creative cocktail by reading about the path followed by the artist who responded. This works both ways. Poems that were first inspired by an original painting have been printed on bright white paper — for those, look first at the painting, and then see where and how the art inspired the words.

The best part of the A.W.E. show is that we are privy to the process. In writing about her response poem (“The Gift Horse”) to the monoprint “Island Spirit” by Molly Dufort, writer Jan Bennett shares the journey of this exchange:

“The initial challenge for me was to engage with a painting done in a style and palette so different from my own... During the four months the horse and I studied each other from various perspectives in my art room, I saw beyond the physical horse to a spirit that spoke to me as both artist and writer. I am grateful for the enriching connection.”

Working the other way, the original poem by Mary Durel, “The Eye of the Beholder” inspired Anna Crosby’s acrylic response, “Season to Season.” The poem is vivid and spare with piercing imagery and a palpable mood of loss. The first stanza: “The dropped flesh of the crimson tulip / bleeds under my heel on the concrete walk. / The first hot sun / sears my winter arms. / Summer has begun the slow murder / of its predecessor — / the hydrangea sprawling over the daffodils, / the rose sharpening its spines on the anemones.” Crosby’s acrylic is a pastiche of flowers and trees. Winter crocuses peek from the snow in one corner and tender rose buds emerge from another. This is a brightly affirmative sampler of a painting, with blossoms and bushes crowded together, plucked from their season and illuminated in a wash of golden light.

As Ava Richey writes in her introduction to the show, this art is “what happens when we truly pay attention to one another.”

A hospital — is this an odd place for an art show? Not at all, and especially for those who take time to explore the reading “Untitled” by Eugene Fitch, with its companion mixed media by Patricia Pike. As Pike described when writing about her process, “This poem raised immediate memories of my own heart surgery. The experience is always on the edge of my consciousness so I found the painting a real emotional challenge, and a relief to complete.”

Pike’s painting hangs in the hall to the right of the entrance. Don’t miss it, and don’t forget to look in the small hall opposite the hospital’s reception desk. That’s where you’ll find “The Persephone Series” by Victoria Tierney, a 13-part digital painting companion piece to Ron Miranda’s “Persephone” poem. Inspired by the myth and by each other, they offer images layered with imagery, and art inspired by process.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments can be e-mailed to malbert3@verizon.net.