“So you want to understand what will happen as we lose the ice on Svalbard?” He took another swig of beer, then set his glass down on the table creating a new ring on the surface. “Imagine you have some ice cubes on the table. If you like, you can arrange the blocks across from …
I am midway, a little over the middle, of my six weeks in the US. Traveling in these days is interesting. Which is a way of saying complicated, not easy, but not terrible, and contains unexpected surprises both good and bad. I landed in Minneapolis, and shortly thereafter Kij and I began driving across the …
When I began taking photos I walked the same few miles of West Seattle every day. I learned the landscape of my neighborhood: the different architectures, the gardens, the ways the changing seasons altered light and color. I walked at night and in the day, through sun and fog, rain and snow. I became as …
I don’t think there is any greater gift for an artist than the gift of time. So when Kij suggested we do a residency together rather than our usual Iceland trip I was enthusiastic. I immediately thought of three, no four, no five things I wanted to accomplish. In addition to the usual long walks, soaks in hot pots, and rambling back roads in the car, of course.
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 …