There is a saying “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” Like many traditional sayings, it comes with that grain of truth. Our lives are the not the great sweeps of drama depicted in novels, but exist in the quotidian. The house needs cleaning. There’s a parent-teacher meeting for the kids. Will …
Today was spent working on the 2022 calendar. Every calendar I have made has a title that has personal meaning for me. The first, 2018, was titled One Good Year. This sprang from my desire to have one year where no one died. The previous years so many people died. My husband, my brothers, my …
Winter is in the air. The temperatures are not yet cold, a little above zero. But you can taste what’s coming, and now that we lose the sun, temperatures get lower at night. We have had frost. Today I was walking along the river, and I saw ice. I scrambled out into the river bed to look.
I often joke that I photograph landscapes because they move slowly enough that I can capture them. This isn’t really true. While (in general) the features of landscape don’t change, the light does, and it can change fast. There are plenty of shots I miss simply because I’m not in the right place at the …
Deciding to paint twenty meters (sixty-five feet) of canvas with small white dots is not to be taken lightly. My studio isn’t large enough to spread out five meters of canvas, never mind twenty. Also, there’s no art supply store in Longyearbyen. While in most small towns you can drive to the next largest town …
The Process of Painting Drift Ice: Loss and Change Read More »
I was in Seattle when corona broke out. My plan was to stay for a month, visit friends and family, and sell my condo. When I left Svalbard for Seattle there was merely a whisper of this new disease in China, and that people in Italy were ill. Two weeks later everything changed. Two weeks …
I am picky about substrate (the thing that paint goes on). I don’t care for cotton canvas. I don’t like the texture or the bounce. Linen is better, but I still don’t like the bounce of canvas. I prefer to paint on panels. As one can imagine, there are problems with this when one lives …
Cyanotype can be delicate, at least cyanotypes printed on rag paper. Arches Platine is a wonderful paper — shockingly strong. But any paper that spends over a half hour being washed in a water bath is having a grueling experience. Sometimes, it shows. The photo sensitive coating is intended to soak into the paper fibers. …
March 29 I am moving to Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Trying to find a place to live in a location under such a severe housing crisis is hard. Every avenue I explored turned into a dead end. I had the first two weeks of April at the residency to hang my show, but I didn’t know where …
I never expected to become an alchemist. If anyone had told me that I would spend hours under a red light in a dark room mixing chemicals, I would not have believed them. And yet here I am, and it is magical. The first enchanted moment is coating paper. Once the chemicals are mixed they …