SANDPOINT — Some people scan a piece of art and catch the thread of a story. Sandpoint’s Teresa Pesce sees entire plays.

Pesce recently launched her Art as Theatre concept with a script titled “Postcards” — an August production inspired by the paintings of actor Viggo Mortensen. She plans to follow that up with another work based on nine paintings by visual artist Stephen Shultz.

Schultz’s Sandpoint studio — the very depiction of a Soho artist’s loft lifted up and dropped in the heart of Sandpoint — is peppered with large-canvas works that tell their own stories in mostly muted tones that commingle and dance with shadows and light.

The artist describes his work as “open-ended.”  When someone asks the question, “Is this what it means?” his reply is, “Why not?”

“It’s astonishing, amazing what people’s interpretations can be,” he said.

Shultz welcomed Pesce’s interest in his paintings as the visual backdrop for a theatrical narrative. The format is designed so that viewers will pause, consider and confront his paintings, rather than give them a quick look and move along.

“It’s flattering, because people spend, on average, three seconds in front of a painting in a gallery,” he said. “People spend more time with Teresa’s work and that enriches the artwork.”

Deborah McShane will direct a cast of nine local actors in “Red Tape.”  As a pioneer actor and director in Sandpoint’s now-defunct Unicorn Theatre Players and a co-founder of the more recent Looking Glass Theatre group, McShane was attracted to the idea of blending acting with other art forms.

“We’re supportive of the arts, in general, in this town,” she said. “What I was excited about was having new theatre and this just seemed so right.

“It’s an adventure — an Alice in Wonderland kind of thing to climb in and out of paintings,” the director added.

Shultz’s work will be suspended above the Panida Theater stage for the January run of the play, with each piece called out using selective lighting as new scenes begin. The effect will be subtler than the projected visuals used in “Postcards,” the playwright said, calling that staging technique “too distracting.”

The artist isn’t worried that the actors’ dialog will cement any meaning to his work for those who see the play. The images are open to interpretation but defy any attempt to sum them up in anything as brief as a single scene, according to Schultz, who takes a writer’s approach to creating the artwork.

“The paintings are done over a long period of time, so they’re much more like a novel than a short story,” he said. “They’re clearly an associative narrative, as I make them.”

The narrative gleaned by Pesce from the nine pieces she selected takes a common theme in Shultz’s work — strands that alternately bind characters up or bind them together — and imparts broad, theatrical brush strokes to the artist’s original fine lines.

“From that, I extrapolated ‘Red Tape,’” the playwright said, adding that the binding force in her script is family ties, with DNA acting as the strand that hold things together.

Her narrator — a man in his late-60s — leads the audience down his own life path as he shares his process of self-realization. The cast covers a fairly wide spectrum of age and experience, with local actors Greta Weber, Zachary Sabbah, Timothy Earl and Dawnya Clarine as principal characters, as well as Eric Bond, Kate McAlister, Susan Fiskin, Casper Reitz and Andrew Sorg in other roles.

Once the paintings gave spark to the scenes in her play, Pesce noted, the interaction between her characters fanned it into a flame.

“I write dialog like a river,” she said. “I just turn something around like a diamond and look at all the facets.”

Pesce envisions her Art as Theatre pieces as a potential channel for bringing visual artists, musicians and actors together to create a theatrical Mecca in Sandpoint.

Shultz, meanwhile, believes different art forms can be “reciprocally enlivened” by being combined, but doesn’t picture himself approaching a blank canvas with thoughts of inspiring a future one-act.

“It’s hard enough to find the truth every day in the studio without those outside influences coming in,” he said. “I get to make the work totally apart from everything else in the world, so it’s completely indulgent from that standpoint. It’s total separation of church and state.”

“Red Tape” will be performed Jan. 15, 16, 22 and 23 at 7:30 p.m. on the Panida Theater stage. For ticket information call 263-9191 or 265-2083.

To view the artwork of Stephen Shultz, visit: www.swspaint.com