“Industrial Pastorale,” is a series of work exploring the edge zone between rural and urban landscape. The landscape of these images comes primarily from the Anacortes shipyards and road trips throughout the Skagit Valley. The work digitally combines painting and original photography in limited edition pigment prints on archival paper. For most of these images two sizes are available. The larger size is printed on German Etching in editions of 3 to 5, and the smaller size is printed on sheets of 17 x 22″ German Etching or Moab Entrada in editions of 35. All dimensions are in inches. This series was created for my solo show at Perry & Carlson. The prints may now be purchased in my shop, where the cost includes shipping. There is a discount if you purchase directly from my studio and shipping is not required. The full set of listings will be added throughout April. To read the story behind this series please pour yourself a cup of tea or some fine Scotch and read my little essay of the germination, New Landscapes: Memories of the Farm. Until the prints are posted in my shop feel free to contact me for a studio visit to see the work in person.
Search Results for: road trip
New Directions with Italian Plaster
After my inspirational time with Jennifer Carrasco I am diving into the new/old technique of Italian plaster and reveling in what happens when you let surface speak. In the past I’ve tended to get nervous when I spend a lot of time making a surface to paint or draw on. The calligrapher in me wants to have a stack of a hundred sheets of paper and nothing to lose by drowning in ink, again and again, and throwing whatever happens on the floor for later reflection. The word “precious” comes up when I think of sanding and painting and sanding again and then glazing and . . . then trying to put something down on such a huge investment of time.
If you are a recovering calligrapher or watercolorist you know this tyranny of the perfect sheet of rag paper. With a pristine sheet of BFK or $20 rice paper there is really nowhere to go but [Read more…]
Studio Visit with Muralist and Teacher Jennifer Carrasco
If you have ever attended a soiree at The Ruins, Seattle’s most exclusive and mysterious supper club, you may have looked up for a moment across the gilt rim of your absinthe and locked eyes with The Cougar. As your gaze moved from the patterning of leaves to the shy otter and then to the majestic drape of the big cat’s paws you may have found yourself wondering about the artist, and the style, which is an uncanny blend of ornament and botanical exactitude. The Cougar is but one panel in an epic mural that goes from ceiling to floor, creating an atmosphere of timeless excess and contemplation. Hearing the artist’s name was “Carrasco,” you might have assumed the work was done by some Italian guy imported from The Old Country to put a polish on the Northwest.
You would be right that the artist was imported, but he is a she, and she comes from the Inland Empire town of Pomeroy, next door to the Palouse. Jennifer Carrasco got her start in the dry scree and lazy rivers of the American west. There she fell in love with landscape and learned the stillness that comes of wandering quiet empty places. The oldest of four daughters, she was raised going to mass every Sunday and singing Gregorian chants. A close-knit town with deep roots, Pomeroy embodies the best of family, connection and continuity, but it’s also the kind of place an imaginative person might yearn to leave, just to see what’s beyond the hills. After getting her BA degree in art and education at WSU Jennifer took off for the big world.
She has led many lives, far beyond her small-town roots, as part of the Peace Corps in the Phillipines, as a mother, a poet, and as a painter and teacher in Japan, Alaska, and the deep South. By the time she landed back on the West Coast she had a wealth of artistic influences to draw from. Her assignment for the Ruins was to create a style of “Northwest Rococo,” and every detail of fauna and flora is researched and authentic, drawing on a year of research into painting styles, ornament, and museum artifacts and diaries from the early days of the Northwest Territories. [Read more…]
Western Landscape Photography Portfolio
New Directions: Photographs of the Western Landscape
Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?
– Robert Adams
In October I found myself in the middle of an ocean of grass almost swallowed by basalt. I looked up at the black palisade of stone stacked against sky, a magpie’s wing shadowing the trail ahead, and asked out loud: “Is this a photograph? Should I follow this impulse? Landscape photography isn’t what I really do…..”
There was long pause as my walking companion vanished around a bend. The field caught the slant of afternoon sun like knife blades, each edge of grass etched against stone. The moment seemed to command me to see and record in a way I was not accustomed to – not with the collage artist’s eye for disassemblage, but as a witness to the exact 1/60th of a second in front of me. I raised my camera and started shooting, unsure of why, but thinking maybe I’d figure it out before the sun set.
Although I have been obsessed with cameras and photography for much of my life, I have never considered myself a traditional “photographer.” Rather, I have seen the camera as way to inquire and to be present in place. The images made have always been secondary to the experience that looking through a lens affords. The technology of f-stops and aperture and ASA, the confounding dials with microscopic lines between here and my destination, and the chance, in analog days, of a precious 36 exposures tripping on a sprocket, all seemed to require a full time German in residence, and I am much more Irish. I have always been immune to systems, and I suffer from profound dyslexia when it comes to math. Someone asked me recently if this new series of landscape photographs was made using the “zone system” and I had to check my voluminous and completely disorganized notes – oh yes, that. My process is intuitive, and overlays multiple systems based on the aesthetics of printmaking and drawing.
In making photographic prints I am looking for luminance and iconic form, and a sense in the body of being there. Are there ten shades of gray from white to black – who cares? Does it feel and look like memory and the way the air moved? Can I smell the smoke in the air, or the sage, or hear the sound basalt makes as it cools down between late afternoon and evening?
Thoughts on the Act of Editing: Photographic Reality, and How you Look at a Forest Fire
New Directions: Western Landscape Photography Part 1
Today I have been living with this tree, captured originally in full color (though muted and overcast) in a forest east of the mountains. I say, “this tree,” but you, the viewer, might not be seeing the same tree I am. You might be seeing the tree on the right, scorched by fire, and interlaced with the bleached needles of a pine that may or may not see spring. I am aware of that tree also. But in the moment of stepping into this meadow what stood out against the uneven and patchy hill was the shimmering tree with yellow leaves and white bark. In a soundscape emptied of birds the wind in its leaves made the only sound.
As I go back in time to this moment the digital darkroom allows me to ask “What is this story about?” countless times, and each time to come up with a different answer. A voice I’ve heard often says “People don’t like dark. Make it light, make it hopeful.” Leonard Cohen speaks up on another station and says, helpfully “Make it darker,” as for that poet the darker the shadows the brighter the illumination. In developing a photographic print I cycle through decision after decision, undoing, saving, revisiting, doubting, knowing, unknowing. Each revision of value rewrites light’s story, saying: the point is the mountain, or the pines, or the sky. Finally it may land on this, perhaps a tale of the heroine in white, surrounded by courtiers and knights and armies in the distance.
In the forests around Yakima the shape of the aspens tug at a memory of the archaic, and make me think of Joan of Arc in a book I saw as a child. The pages of the book were engraved and brown at the edges, pungent with age. Joan sat on her horse deep in a copse, her armor camouflaged by dappled light, her sword glinting. The style was detailed, each leaf individually drawn and burnished against a pewter sky. In the grove, momentarily safe, Joan was thinking, and gathering herself. On my hikes I kept looking for her, expecting her to ride forth, tossing her hair as she leaned under a branch, turned a corner on the trail, and paused to look out into the distance. What would Joan have said? Dark or light, or a middle tone? I am not sure, but her horse would have led up the canyon into the fire, which was still smoking. [Read more…]