Cora Edmonds is optimistic, productive and perky, and would never be described as a brooding artist. However, the West Seattle resident does have quite a brood, and all-of-a- sudden, too.

Edmonds, a photographer and the owner of the elegant, 3000 square-foot ArtXchange Gallery, 512 First Avenue South, in the heart of SODO, adopted three siblings from Ukraine four months ago with husband, Phil Crean, and brought them home to his two teens, her step-children. Add to that the young Nepalese villagers she and Phil are sending to school long-distance and you wonder when she has time to sell paintings or take pictures.

“I was a marketing manager at Microsoft, and I love technology but really had a passion for photography, art, traveling, people,” she said. Her husband is in the international seafood industry. “I wasn’t rich, but just followed my passion. I’m at the gallery 10 to15 hours a week because of the kids. I have a very well run team at work. We deal mostly in contemporary art and focus bringing in different world cultures, artists with their own aesthetics.”

Thursday, March 4, and Thursday, April 1, ArtXchange will have two openings for their show “Sense Us 2010!” to coincide with SODO’s First Thursday Art Walk. The show will hang for two months.

“It is of course a play on words on this year’s census,” she said. “We want to take a snapshot in time of what the Latino/Hispanic artist in the Pacific Northwest is doing,” she said. “Our 10 featured artists will show a diversity in themes.”

Edmonds’ immersion into motherhood began, not in the usual way, but with a large color photograph she took of a 6 year-old in 2000 while filming a documentary in rural Nepal. The boy looks into the camera with piercing eyes and gentle grin partially obscured by his pressed hands, a “namaste” greeting traditional to his culture, a deferential welcoming gesture.

“My husband and I met because of that photo,” said Edmonds. “He came in to buy it. I have found that many people have connected to this photo. He is the ‘boy who brought everybody together.’

“We decided to return to Nepal to find this child,” she said, who would be 13. “I remember exactly where I took that, in Simikot, Northwest Nepal. We landed there by cargo helicopter and carried the photo. We didn’t find him in Simikot so we trekked from village to village. There are no motorized vehicles.

“We found a school where the headmaster said, ‘I know this boy. His name is Gyeni Bohara.’ He knew the village Gyeni lived in by his clothes in the photo, Thehe (pronounced “tay HAY”) is a six-hour trek from Simikot and has about 3,000 people that cling to the side of a mountain.

“We were like the pied piper walking around Thehe because there were like 20 kids following us around. We finally asked if they knew this boy’s name and it turned out he was one of the 20 in the crowd. It was just fate. We were thrilled. It was very uncertain to find him seven years later. His family could have moved. He could have died from male nutrition. Anything.

“His family lives in this cave dug into the side of the mountain. The region is so lacking in basic infrastructure. It is still agrarian based, wood for fire, and not a single toilet, no electricity, or running water.”

Seldom to tourists wander into Thehe said Edmonds, but some trek out from there to hike Mount. Kailash in nearby Tibet.

“We decided we’d like to give back,” she said. “We had some revenue from selling the photo of Gyeni, and he brought my husband and me together.”

With his parents’ blessing they helped Gyeni Bohara attend a school in another town. Edmonds said that was his one wish. As a result, they established the non-profit organization www.namastechildrensfund.org to help more children in impoverished rural Nepal get an education. On this website you will see the “Namaste” photo of him.

Back home, in the large100 year-old historic house on Sunset Avenue SW they spent a year updating, they started thinking of adopting two siblings from Vietnam to join Simon, 16, and Anna, 14. Edmunds traveled to Vietnam a lot for business had an affinity for the country, but said the United States government shut down the adoption program they were going to use because of too many irregularities.

Fate again played its hand as they were directed to an adoption program in Ukraine.

Edmonds explained, “The agency there had three Ukraine/Vietnamese siblings and asked if we would like to meet them. We were like, ‘Three? Are you kidding?’ My husband is from New Zealand, and I was born in Hong Kong, so they must have thought they found a good cultural fit.

Sisters Karina, 10, Valeria, 7, and their brother Dima, 8, are “still in the throws of adjustment,” said Edmonds, who brought them to Seattle four months ago. They arrived speaking no English and attend West Seattle Montessori School.

“Our teenagers came with us to Ukraine for 10 days to meet them last summer,” said Edmonds. “We wanted them to see the orphanage environment where their future siblings came from, rather than first seeing them just showing up at our house.”

For more information on Sense Us 2010! Visit: www.artxchange.org