This morning the lawn was brilliant with yellow leaves and a windy light. By late afternoon the sky had darkened, and snow is predicted tomorrow. I looked at the fallen lillies and melting hostas, all the garden’s brave last gasps of color, and laid my head upon the memory of summer. Where is that attic bedroom, that one with chenille bedspread and the embroidered pillow? The one where afternoon light motes were gold as pollen and the bees gathered in the windowsills….?
The Artist Trust EDGE program was an extraordinary week. Fifteen dedicated artists of diverse mediums, and a roster of fine business coaches, curators and time management gurus together at Fort Worden in Port Townsend. We had spectacular weather. I will be processing this experience for many months to come, but here are a few photographs I took during the week that give you a sense of the place. I have enough material for a year of prints.
I’ll admit working on an “artist statement” intermittently and obsessively for seven days at first seemed like an exercise in self absorbtion and folly. Especially as I had no computer and wrote the thing by hand — how I missed playing the piano of the keyboard! But on the last morning as I set out to shoot, everything suddenly came together and made sense. I feel like I really know why I am doing what I am doing as an artist, perhaps for the first time.
I hope you will come down to Pioneer Square this first Thursday to the opening of the juried “Icon” show at Fraker/Scott Gallery. The show will be up for a month, with a reception for the artists and an awards ceremony on Saturday, September 24 from 5-7 PM. The gallery is located at 121 Prefontaine Pl. S in the Tashiro Kaplan building (425.883-4633.)
My piece is a collage transfer print created from a recent photoshoot in the Duwamish industrial area. It is both an homage to one of the great emblems of modern engineering, the Hydrant, and a record of one day, captured and layered in collage-space.
This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren’t weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.
This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past with autumn’s melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffitied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.
I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I’ll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt. See more of these images in the gallery The Natural World
Oh, Phoebe, talk to me some more, you don’t have to go…..
So many years and moments of my life were lived to the sound of your soaring voice. I made this image in memory of you last night, while listening to The Poetry Man. You will be missed.
Pastel and photographic collage transfer print on Arches 88.