
Vanishing Seattle Comes to Bumbershoot!

In the long distance between this post and the last I have been single-mindedly focused on creating my first book: The Water Tower Project. I have always moved back and forth between word and image, and as time has passed the words have grown from notes in the margins of sketchbooks and social media into essays in their own right. The urgency of recent political events has sparked an idea that has been waiting to take shape since 2020.
As a long-time designer of letterforms, I always look first to words and symbols to wrestle meaning out of chaos. During pandemic’s first months I created a series of 20 pieces of photographic art called The Water Tower Project. The water tower emerged as a symbol that evolved into an image; the form became a container into which I could pour my sense of disequilibrium, and hope to stumble into transformation. The water tower, hand-hammered, crafted by artisans, and hoisted to the city skyline, is the German Shepherd of industrial infrastructure. Noble, resilient, stoic, a timeless architectural archetype poised on the rooftop between heaven and earth. Judge or Witness? It is also a character and a canvas on which to project collective story.
Five years post-2020, as we are confronted with a new order of global and national disruption, this series has become more relevant than ever. I have returned to the subject with three new pieces included in the book. The pages alternate between image and story, reflecting on parallel streams of politics, history, personal evolution and collective struggle as we move through unprecedented times.
It’s Tariff Week, and the stock ticker has gone missing from Fox News today, presumably to indicate what a special moment this is. It’s beginning to feel a lot like 2008. That was the spring I sat stunned at my kitchen table watching the securities auctions fail, the securities that TD Ameritrade had said “were as safe as a money market but better.” My kitchen table became my oasis for reinventing sanity and meaning through drawing. There was no internet, only a radio and a tape cassette. Silence, doom, music, repeat. The silence was at first excruciating, but as I drew, it became an enveloping calm and helped me through a time of instability and fear I had not known before. The blog post of that moment has come in handy several times since. Kitchen tables stand the test of time.
In honor of that memory I have returned to the work created then and refined the drawings as the Spring Tulip Suite in my stationary collection. It has been a quiet revelation to pick up a pencil and to go back into work done 17 years ago. As part of my TariffWeek sale, subscribers to my newsletter receive a 10% discount on items in my shop (excluding stationary.) If you would like to receive a discount code I would love to welcome you as a subscriber!
In other print news, Seattle Art Museum Gallery has added a selection of unframed work from gallery artists, which you can peruse in the front of the gallery by the painting racks. I am excited to have a rotating collection of my limited edition prints there!
As in 2020, the eerie lack of rails on society and the economy has brought the opportunity of time to explore and develop new ideas without external pressures. It is a great comfort to go “back to the land” and the farm structures and pastoral patterns of rural life that surrounded me as a child. If, at the end of the next four years, I can paint a convincing barn I’ll be happy. Here are a few quick glimpses of work in the studio: surface, abstraction, atmosphere and architecture.
Regardless of the weather ahead, the sun today is lovely. I hope you can find the time to take a walk, gather camelias, and admire the incorruptible beauty of spring.
As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.
I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.
Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. [Read more…]