Suze’s art news and upcoming talks (April 2024)

Hi, I wanted to let you know about several near-term occasions as well as some that are more distant…

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At 1pm on Saturday April 20, Dr. David L. Peterson and I will be giving a talk called Carbon Flows at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA, as a part of the Silva Cascadia exhibit. (My 21-.5-foot-long burned tree painting is part of the exhibit.)

The Magnitude of the Problem, varnished watercolor on torn paper in seven ~49″H panels, mounted on shaped board.

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On April 26 at 5pm the Northwest Watercolor Society will have a virtual reception for its annual members show, which includes my “Yellow Hill Twins” painting:

Yellow Hill Twins, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52″H x 25″W x 2″D

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On April 27 at 1 pm I’ll be giving a talk-and-tour at the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon where my fabric tree installation, “State of the Forest” is on display. My talk will be part of their annual fire preparedness weekend. While the installation is usually part of David J. Wagner’s Environmental Impact II exhibit, it is having a solo detour there through the end of April. World Forestry Center’s mission, beautiful setting and dramatic presentation of my work could not be more apt, and I’m honored to be there. They made a thoughtful short video interview with me and collaborating author, Lorena Williams, that is available on YouTube and their exhibit web page.

State of the Forest installation at World Forestry Center Discovery Museum (Mario Gallucci photo)

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Cedar Visages is part of the annual ICON show at Lynn Hanson Gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. There is a reception on Saturday April 13 from 2-4pm.

Cedar Visages, varnished watercolor on torn paper, mounted on shaped board, 52″H x 31″W x 2″D

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There will be a virtual reception for members of the National Watercolor Society on May 4 of their annual members exhibit. Logged, Drifted and Burned is part of it.

Logged, Drifted and Burned, varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on shaped board, 52″H x 24.5″W x 2″D

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Ars Datum Est, Volume 14 and one of my favorites in my bark beetle book series, is part of the show at Dakota Gallery, the first art exhibit to accompany the Cascadia Film Festival in Bellingham, April 5 – May 31.

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I will be part of SPACE-Plein Air Painters of Washington’s exhibit and paint out  on June 1. Cross your fingers for good weather!

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Later on this summer Puget Sound Book Artists’ annual exhibit at the University of Puget Sound’s Collins Library begins June 5, with a reception from 4:30pm-6:30pm on June 6. It runs to August 1; then it will travel to The Evergreen State College for September 29-December 20.

Top: A Brief Bestiary of Bark Beetles, back, front and side view of artist book 38″H x 11″W x 13″D. The lumber was given to me by cabinetmaker emertius Kurt Roheim who logged and milled the boards himself. The lines from the mill reminded me of children’s handwriting exercise sheets and from there the idea of a rhyming alphabet book of bark beetles arose. I realized that an illustration of each species’ gallery could stand in for the usual initial capital letter.
Middle and Bottom: The Magnitude of the Problem, artist accordion-fold book 10″H x 7.5″W closed, 60″W open. The pages are formed by the panels of the original painting and their backs have the story Lorena Williams wrote for the large fabric installation.

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Much later — October 17 — I’ll be giving a virtual talk for the McMillen Foundation on “the art of collaboration.” Registration is already open!

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I’ll hope to catch a glimpse of you on one of these occasions!

P. S. If you’re curious about my February artist residency in Great Basin National Park, I wrote a blog post here and the Park has an archive here

Great Great Basin

I was privileged to be Artist-in-Residence at Great Basin National Park this winter. Even though working and hiking conditions would certainly be less restrictive in other seasons, I loved the quiet solitude. Whenever I veered off the few closed access roads or often-used trails (one!), I crossed no other human tracks. The first couple of weeks offered some beautiful backcountry skiing, although for a sea-level inhabitant, it was strenuous to break my own trail at high elevation. It was inspirational to experience such expanses alone.

(That’s a deer track, climber’s right, not another ski track : – )

Happy as I was to have heat and hot water in a small Park Service cabin, not being able to work outside for very long meant concentrating on smaller rather than larger paintings. So instead of my typical residency agenda of large pieces requiring prolonged concentration, I went hunting for endemic landscapes, explored areas of recent burns, and let the place speak to me in its own language. (I also found the surfaces of Lehman Cave to be even harder to paint than the char textures of burned trees!)

Clearing at Meadow Views, watercolor on paper, 11″ x 15″. The Park has an archive of my paintings here.

While there I read William L. Fox‘s the void, the grid & the sign, which profoundly enriched my sensory experience of the vast spaces I was seeing and my understanding of the area’s history — not only as factual narrative but as aesthetic and epistemological treatise mixed with personal reflections — fancier than my efforts but not dissimilar to my residency.

On trips outside the Park, as the snowfall of my first weeks melted and shrank, while watching where to place my feet, I began picking up small, typical human detritus–rusty tin cans, beer bottles, etc. and pairing it with natural scraps–pine cones, cottonwood leaves, etc. I could set them up on my small table and thus began a new series: Nevada Still Lifes.

Left to right, top row: Turkey feathers, shot-up can; Can and pinon cones; Coffee can and cottonwood leaves. Bottom row: Beer bottle and Douglas fir cones, Rebar and trilobite shale, Sardine can and spruce cones.

I am at work crafting a human/nature book form for them — stay tuned for updates!

Besides helpful Park and Great Basin Foundation staff, a shout-out to Bristlecone General Store/Stargazer Inn for helping fill in missing supplies, book nook and folding me into such community events as Book Club, Knitting Club, Moonlight Hike, Mardi Gras parade and the warmth and interest of the Baker, Nevada citizens I met there.

Both the landscape and the people make me eager to return!

Suze’s Art News January 2024

Apologies for a lack of communication in the last few years, there have been so many challenges. But I am so excited about several upcoming items I had to share them!

The World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon is hosting an exhibit of my large fabric tree installation, “State of the Forest” as well as another suspended fabric piece “Core Values.” (See What’s Inside Our Museum – World Forestry Center.) The opening is January 31, 5-7:30 pm and I will be there in person. The exhibit runs from then to the end of April, and I’ll be back to give a tour-talk for the Wildfire Preparedness weekend of April 27-28.

Image above: “State of the Forest” Installation Photograph, Environmental Impact II, Produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C. (Photo Courtesy of The James Museum, St. Petersburg, FL)

Image above from Olympic National Park’s glacier memorial site: Terminus: Bretherton Snowfield by Suze Woolf.

I could not have completed this project without the help of Arisa Brown who dyed and quilted the sediment cores (middle) and Janet Stone who wove the ice cores (left), not to mention the many scientists, artists and others who gave me input.

Image above: The Magnitude of the Problem, varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on 7 panels, 21.5-feet long

I will also be part of Museum of Northwest Art’s Silva Cascadia exhibit Silva Cascadia — Museum of Northwest Art (monamuseum.org)  opening soon. There will be a panel discussion and reception at the opening February 3, 3-5pm that I will attend. I’ll also be back April 20 for a 1 pm talk Carbon Flows with my wise and accomplished forestry expert, Dr. David L. Peterson. (La Conner, Washington)

There are several other events I’m delighted to be part of: Studio 103’s collaboration with civic poet Shun Yu Pai for “Art in A Poem”. I plan to attend the reception there on January 20. (Seattle, Washington)

Gallery 110’s February annual competition includes one of my burned tree portraits, see Upcoming Exhibitions. (Seattle, Washington)

Port Angeles Fine Arts Center has a book arts show on collaborations with 3 of my pieces: Strong Together- An Artist Book Collaborative, February 9 through May. (Port Angeles, Washington)

The Center for Urban Horticulture’s also has a Puget Sound Book Artists exhibit for the month of January, see Elisabeth C. Miller Library. The weather-postponed reception will be January 20 at noon. (Seattle, Washington)

There are a number of in-person openings I’m going to miss in February, but I’ve got a good reason: I will be artist-in-residence in the remote high-elevation Great Basin National Park in Nevada (brr!). I’m hoping my backcountry skills will allow me to visit their ancient bristlecone pines.

If I don’t catch you in January, I shall hope to see you in March!

UPDATE:

Due to the January storms in Portland, the State of the Forest reception has been delayed until February 27, 2024, 5:00 – 7:30pm. I still plan to attend; the World Forestry Center asks for RSVPs, see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0Nai2inTlgLQmCB4IsiXSH1rXIZwblSavp1TccZzGEaseOA/viewform. Here is their new invitation:

Suze’s Art News September 2022

Suze’s Art News September 2022

“Art ought to be a troublesome thing, and one of my reasons for painting representationally is that this makes for much more troublesome pictures.”  David Park (posted on the wall above his paintings in the Oakland Museum of California.)

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Carbon is a show at The Vestibule gallery in Seattle. I hung one of my burned tree paintings on the wall and installed a “fire pit” on the floor below it. The stone circle contains objects evoking the top carbon-emitting sectors: energy production, transportation, and agriculture, with a chunk of concrete for the built environment as one member of the ring of stones. There is an opening/performance 9/10 starting at 6 pm that I will attend.

Carved Out, Varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52”H x 10”W (shown rotated)

Fire pit, installation, ~30” in diameter (that is a gas pump handle, not a pistol!)

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I’m happy to be in Lynn Hanson Gallery’s annual ICON show again with both a burned tree painting and a bark beetle book. There is a Seattle reception there 2-4 pm, also on 9/10, that I plan to attend.

Left top and bottom: Bark Beetle Book Volume XXXIII: Hyphae Half-round log, handmade and commercial papers, abaca fiber; 14”H x 6”W x 8”D plus. extended fibers
Right: Twisted, Varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52H x 21”W

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I gave a virtual talk for The Bug Society (aka “Scarabs”) in July and have several coming up: Seattle’s Book Arts Guild at 7pm on 9/8, and, together with Lorena Williams, “Wildfire in Beloved Places” on 9/15 for the Wildling Museum’s Fire & Ice exhibit.

The Magnitude of the Problem, digitally printed on fabric in three layers: solid, transparent (left, seen from the front,) and text on black (right, seen from back). The text is Lorena Williams’ story of visiting the threatened Mariposa Grove.
(In the background is one of Amiko Matsuo’s innovative Phos-Chek paintings.)

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I had the pleasure of being a resident at the Mineral School in early August. I finished two new burned tree paintings and still managed to get out to nearby Mount Rainier for hikes and seven small landscape paintings.

Patrol Cabin at Lake George, The Mountain from Mineral Lake and The Mountain from High Rock, all watercolor on 11” x 15” paper

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In June I gave an in-person talk in Twisp, WA, as a 2022  Mary Kiesau Community Fellowship recipient. In September-October I will be heading back to the Methow Valley to begin my listening project: to community members, naturalists, and activists about the 2021 fires. I will also explore the burns themselves. I expect hearing from the people most involved and affected to influence my future artwork.

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“Art that Matters to the Planet” continues at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in upstate New York, and “Environmental Impact II” will move from Michigan to Southeast Missouri State University.

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At the end of October, I’ll be installing the Magnitude of the Problem painting in the Shunpike Storefront window at Mercer and Terry Streets in South Lake Union, Seattle, where it will be until the end of January 2023.

Here it is during my Six-fold Increase exhibit at Plasteel in July-August.

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After that I’m looking forward to a quiet spell into early 2023 where I can focus creating on new work!

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Suze’s Art News July 2022

Coming up very soon and somewhat later …

Six-Fold Increase: I’ll show burned tree paintings, including a number of new ones and the 21.5-foot Magnitude of the Problem, at Plasteel Frames & Gallery in the Design Center in July-August. There will be an opening reception July 14 from 5 – 8 pm. (Seattle WA)

Larger than Life, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 51.5”H x 28”W; 2022
(Shown rotated)

Carbon: The Vestibule Gallery is assembling a topical exhibit for September; I will be showing both a burned tree painting and a small installation about carbon emissions. (Seattle WA)

Carved Out, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 51.5”H x 10”W; 2022.
(Shown rotated)

Kirkland Arts Center will be showing 3 of my bark beetle books as part of The Truth is Out There August 24 – October 29, with a reception August 26, 6-8 pm, including the recent collaboration with composer Aldo Daniel Rivera Rentería, who composed a short suite for “What the Beetles Sang.” Listen to it here! (Kirkland WA)

Bark Beetle Book Volume 39, Laser-engraved log slices with Douglas Fir pole beetle galleries (Scolytus monticolae), antique wooden violin clamps

Art that Matters to the Planet is an exhibit at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute July 27– October 30. I assumed they would pick one of my submissions and they asked for six: three burned trees and three bark beetle books! (Jamestown NY)

In Magnuson Park there is a second annual plein air festival. I have two paintings in the exhibit (second floor of the administration building) and will give a demonstration outside the Building 30 front door at noon on July 2. (Seattle WA)

South Park Crane, watercolor on paper, 11” x 15”

The Anacortes Arts Festival juried show has again chosen some of my burned trees, including the complex Deep Creek Triplet and the recent Montana Sandblasted. The Festival runs August 5-7 but the juried gallery opens July 30. However, I will be at a Mineral School residency then and not present for the reception. (Anacortes WA)

Deep Creek Triplet with detail view, 51.5”H x 31”W; varnished watercolor on laser-cut polypropylene, 2021.

The Puget Sound Book Artists’ annual membership exhibit includes What the Beetles Wrote and Below the Bark, in which I used padded fabric printed with my painting of Ponderosa bark as a metaphor for the structure of trees. The show is currently on at the Collins Library, University of Puget Sound, until August 5 (Tacoma WA).

Bark Beetle Volume 38: Ponderosa branch, sticks, custom printed fabric, quilt batting, embroidery, grommets, screws, magnets. 12″ x 19″ long fully open, ~3.75″ diameter closed

Science Stories, a traveling book arts show curated by Lucia Harrison, will be opening at Whitman College’s  Penrose Library in August, then travels to The Evergreen State College January-March 2023. (Walla Walla, WA then Olympia WA)

Bark Beetle Volume 34: Resource Competition Branch with galleries; “blue-stained” dimensional lumber, laser-cut Baltic birch plywood, with laser print transfers, Kevlar thread. 5″H x 12.75″W x 4″D.

Based on a remark by entomologist Kenneth Raffa, that both humans and beetles
like to make their homes from wood, thus we are competing for the same resource.
This video about the book shows its morph from beetle-galleried-branch to dimensional lumber.

Also current, The Wildling Museum continues Fire and Ice until September 26. My co-collaborator Lorena Williams and I will be doing an online talk September 15. The registration link isn’t posted yet but check in mid-August. (Solvang CA and everywhere).

The State of the Forest grove of fabric trees, which has been touring with Environmental Impact II since 2019 just opened at Northwest Michigan College. It will go on to two more stops before finishing at the Detroit Zoo in 2023. (Traverse City MI)

In other news, I’m looking forward to a brief residency, postponed from 2020, that is a joint project of Parks Canada, the Alpine Club of Canada and the Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre in July — and likewise at the aforementioned Mineral School in early August. In September/October I am truly excited to begin my stay in the Methow Valley for the Mary Kiesau Community Fellowship.

The online ecology magazine terrain.org featured my burned tree paintings in June.

My head is spinning — I’ll report back how it all turns out!

Collaboration also = Inspiration

A while ago I wrote a post equating iteration with inspiration, but I have an additional candidate.

My friend Ellie Mathews of The North Press recently wrote a post about the pleasures of collaboration, based on a project we worked on together– one of my bark beetle book series, with a poem by Canadian poet Murray Reiss.

Bark Beetle Book Volume XXXVII: Emergency Brake

In the back-and-forth process of ideas and versions, she suggested I paint a portrait of some Ponderosa bark in the absence of any available locally. I did so and the suggestion continues to bear fruit (cones?) …

First I used it printed on fabric for the cover of a book earlier this winter:

Bark Beetle Book Volume XXXVIII: Below the Bark
The padded fabric is a “quilt” cover on the wood, with beetle galleries visible through the “title window,” as if it were a school paper in a folder.

More recently I’ve been working with a young composer on the East Coast, Aldo Daniel Rivera Renteria; I was referred to him by the office manager of the laser cutters I usually work with, Laser Fremont in Seattle. I wanted to do something with these mysterious wooden clamps we found:

Volume XXXIX: What the Beetles Sang

They turned out to be violin clamps. If you’re out in the country in Norway, you make your own folk violin, doesn’t everybody?!? I knew of book forms in India that use large wood screws to hold sheets of painted wood in boxes, so I felt totally legit using them as a binding.

I asked around for music composition apps because it seemed necessary to reference the musical antecedents, but soon realized even if I could put notes on a stave, I was no composer or arranger. Aldo Daniel Rivera Renteria and I had a bunch of Zoom meetings. He wrote two pieces for me, a longer improvisation (Conversation, Improvisation No. 6 | Wood and Metal – YouTube) and a shorter composition (What the Beetles Sang | Bark Beetles Book Vol. 39 – YouTube).

I once again used the Ponderosa bark painting for a folio that contains the score, both a handwritten page (laser cut on the inside wood pages) and the “typeset” formal score:

Bark Beetle Book Volume XL: The Orchestration of Climate
The cover is printed paper over book boards, the inside wood pages were laser-engraved with some of Aldo’s handwritten notation,
and the separate stitched folio is the formal score.

It was a thrill to work with Aldo whose skills are so different than my own! Every collaboration, to date with with foresters, entomologists, poets, papermakers, letterpress printers and now a composer takes me down new creative paths – talk about a gift that keeps on giving!

Suze’s Art News June 2020

Oh my, how the world has changed! I want to acknowledge that we all are experiencing dislocation and distress – some much, much more than others – as a lame introduction to reporting my art endeavors.

I’m reminded of the scene at the end of Casablanca where Bogart says to Bacall, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three [one] little people [person, i.e., me] don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world….”

My bean count: residencies cancelled or postponed — three; individual pieces of artwork sitting in shuttered exhibit spaces out there in the world — 72; upcoming exhibits cancelled — two; and one cancelled watercolor workshop on a San Juan river trip for Great Old Broads for Wilderness. And no doubt more to come….

….but at least I can’t take it personally!

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My pandemic project gave me deep focus for the first 41 days. This blog post gives greater detail.

As yet untitled, 6 of 7 panels of varnished watercolor on torn paper, 22 feet by widths from 42” – 49”. I have no place large enough to photograph it all together!

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I’m deeply honored to receive a MadArt Artist Relief grant. I plan to use it to extend opportunities for artists less fortunate than me. While not up there yet, the 3-minute application video I created should be viewable on their vimeo page soon.

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Besides the Kirkland Arts Center People’s Choice Award that prompted the big tree pandemic project in the first place, one of my artist books received an award at Northern Arizona University’s “May You Live in Interesting Times” book arts exhibit. (Little did they know how soon their title’s wish would be granted!)

The Narrows, watercolor on paper, 32” x 14”

I also received a small award in the Northwest Watercolor Society’s recent virtual membership exhibit. I was supposed to be the speaker for March, but the meeting was cancelled. Instead I created a short online talk, still viewable here.

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Urban Moonset, watercolor on paper, 11″ x 15″, begun as a demo for my last Gage workshop

I am still planning to teach a landscape workshop for Gage Academy June 13 and 20. (Sign up soon!) Portions are almost certain to be online, but I am hoping our city and county guidelines will permit small outdoor groups to paint in parks if masked and distanced. The irony of trying to paint plein air landscapes indoors online has not escaped me!

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In my neighborhood a Seattle Opera tenor has been giving small street concerts for the duration. When I listen, I can feel a collective human spirit expressed through art. I’m reminded that while occasions can be upended, indeed vita brevis, ars longa….

 

 

 

 

Plein air peut-être?

Notes from an article originally written for the Northwest Watercolor Society’s June 2020 newsletter with tips that may be useful to others

Most likely you know that plein air means outdoors in French (literally “full air”). It refers to the tradition begun by the Impressionists of going outside to paint from life. It was the invention of small, ready-made, soft-metal, portable paint tubes that made it possible. Peut-être is French for “might be,” or “maybe.”

Little will bring more freshness – and challenge! – to your work quite as much as painting outdoors from life. From Thomas Moran to David Hockney, whenever I see an exhibit that pairs artists’ large studio paintings with their preparatory studies, I always love the studies. They may be smaller, less grandiose and less accurate—but they are so much more direct, personal and free.

I also find that it’s something I have to practice regularly; it’s more like a sport: you can’t expect to score a win if you don’t practice. For many years I have participated in an annual plein air competition in late fall, so I am highly motivated to “train” all summer.

And since this kind of painting is honestly one of the harder things to do, you have to be easy on yourself.

Just as last summer, a group of us are still planning to go outside to paint once a week.   Depending on the state and local orders in force at the time, it might have to be 6-feet-apart, masked and gloved. Or separate in our home gardens with a video meeting afterwards.

Suze at Gasworks Park in 2019 (James McFarlane photo)

 

This year there is so much we can’t assume: the parking lots of some city parks are still off limits to parking. Restrooms may not be open. Restaurants, if open, may be only open for take-out. Besides the painting gear outlined below, add masks, gloves and hand-sanitizer to your kit.  We are planning to maintain a sign-in sheet should there be any need for future contact tracing (and will not be used for any other purpose).

Here are some of the tips and practices I have found helpful:

Painting gear:

• Lightweight folding easel and several sheets of paper that fit on it. Some people bring lightweight folding chairs and paint on a board in their laps, but I like standing because my arm is freer. Some people work in small sketchbook; my preference is separate quarter-sheets.
• Small closing palette that fits on my easel shelf, with my go-to landscape colors in it (always in the same order so I don’t have to hunt for a pigment)
• Several favorite brushes – I can get away with only a 1-inch flat, two sizes of rounds and a rigger
• A camera – I always take a photo between the end of my pencil sketch and starting to paint. Rarely do I ever refer back to it, but just taking the photo allows me to paint more freely knowing I have a backup if something unforeseen occurs. (Yes, there was that time they turned the sprinklers on me at Gasworks when I was only half-finished : – )
• Water cups that fit on my easel
• A filled water bottle with a carabiner on its handle; I can clip it and/or my backpack the easel for extra stability if it’s breezy.
• A pencil case with pencil, pencil sharpener, white vinyl and kneaded erasers, clips to hold my paper to my easel’s board, a Swiss Army knife, pen, and a few business cards
• A quick snack like some almonds, a piece of fruit or a granola bar. We may go for lunch afterwards if there’s a quorum and a convenient spot, but sometimes I need a boost before well before then.
• Travel mug – that way you can’t stick your brush in your beverage.
• Sun screen

And now:

• Hand sanitizer, mask, gloves

Clothing:

• Cathy Gill so rightly says, “First the artist must be comfortable.” Dress in layers you can put on or take off, depending on the weather. I always have a spare lightweight jacket and warm hat with me, as I get cold easily standing still whatever the temperature. Sometimes I’ll wear long underwear if it’s less than 60 degrees and breezy, as well as fingerless wool gloves.
• Sun hat with a big brim that shades your eyes and covers the back of your neck. I don’t like to wear sunglasses because they distort my color perception, so that hat is really important. Picking a location where your board and paper are in the shade and not reflecting glare into your eyes helps too.
• As it gets warmer, one of my layers is a big white long sleeved shirt, so I only have to put the sun-goo on my hands and face.

Useful practices:

• I like to walk around a little and review possible subjects before I settle on a particular one. This is one reason it’s nice to have an easy way to carry your stuff: I use a backpack; some folks have rolling carriers.
• If possible, orient your paper and board 90 degrees to the scene you’re painting. That way you’ll be reacting to your painting at least as much as to reality.
• Especially early and late in the shoulder seasons, reverse the usual light-to-dark watercolor practice and paint the shadows first because they’ll be changing the fastest. You can also do a quick value sketch to fix the darks before they’re changed positions.
• I always ask myself, “why is this going to be a painting and not a photograph,” another reminder that I need not be a slave to the reality in front of me. Or, as my colleague Spike Ress once said to me, “you can lie…”

I can’t tell you how much I hope to see you out there, because it means I’ll be able to get out there too!

Suze Woolf

Art in the Time of Coronavirus, or, “The Big Tree”

It will not surprise you to hear I made myself a massive, hunker-down, shelter-in-place project, now nearly three-quarters completed.

In January I received the people’s choice award at a local juried show. One option for the award is an exhibit on a large wall above the checkout counter at a nearby public library. Before the lockdown went into effect, I made it over there to check out the space. One side of the wall is 24 feet wide, with about 6 feet of vertical space. There is also a smaller wall on the other side of a central doorway.

I’ve always meant to try one of my burned tree paintings on the lengthwise axis of a roll of watercolor paper — but been intimidated by the time commitment required. With my beloved wilderness off-limits, I knew I needed something demanding to do.

When completed it will be 22 feet long (not quite an entire roll  of 30 feet : -) Since I don’t have room to work on something that big in my studio, I’m doing it in sections that will hang abutted. I figure if John Grade’s immense Middle Fork sculpture was created in sections, I can do it, too.

I’ll mount them so they can be hung either vertically or horizontally, though I expect most venues will need it to be horizontal.

Panels 1-6: I don’t have enough floor space in the largest room I have to lay them out!

Two friends independently dubbed it “Water Lilies of the Anthropocene.” While it’s nowhere near the size of Monet’s largest water lily paintings, it’s the largest of my 12-year preoccupation with wildland fires, as their remains increase in frequency and severity in our warming climate. The library is excited about it and plans to do some programming around it. I’m excited because lots of people will see it — whenever we can visit libraries once again.

I’ve just starting panel 7 of 7, at ~18.5 feet now. Between that and varnishing and mounting, I think it will take another 3-4 weeks. The animation at the top of this post represents 28 painting days, with 7 panel prep days as well.

We have all had plans and dreams interrupted by the virus. I wish us all good health, an easing of the stresses and strictures, and a chance to show what we’ve been working on during this pandemic siege.

UPDATE May 1, 2020:

The painting portion is finally finished (there’s still varnishing, creating shaped boards to mount them on and mounting them to do).

My photos don’t quite do it justice — it is too large to lay out in any contiguous space in my studio, so each panel has been photographed separately and digitally composited. The color-matching across panels is more accurate in the painting than in these photos.

“The Big Tree,” Watercolor on torn paper, 49″ x 262″ (21’10”)

It’s fun to see it in its possible vertical orientation, too. One thing that surprised me: the panels also look surprisingly meaningful as separate side-by-side pieces.

Proposed window display of 5 of 7 panels, side-by-side orientation

Any suggestion for a title welcome!

UPDATE October 1, 2020:

Panel 2 of what I finally decided to call The Magnitude of the Problem has been accepted into the Northwest Watercolor Society’s 80th Annual International Exhibit (online this pandemic year).  It will be viewable beginning the evening of October 27.

UPDATE July 2022

The painting was on display in the Kirkland Public Library October of 2021 to January of 2022. I was thrilled by how much the library was involved – we created an all-ages reading list and together author Lorenda Williams and forestry professor David L. Peterson and I gave a virtual talk.

The Magnitude of the Problem at the Kirkland Public Library

Then a fabric version of the painting was created with Arisa Brown‘s help and a new story by Lorena, featuring the threat to the Mariposa Grove. It has been on display at the Wildling Museum in Solvang, California, and we’ll be giving a virtual talk for it on September 15.

The fabric version at The Wildling Museum

With stories by Lorena Williams; Phos-Chek artwork by Amiko Matsui in background

Currently the original painting is in a solo show at Plasteel Frames and Gallery in Seattle. I am equally thrilled by how it looks wrapped around an inside corner.

Next up will be a large window display through Shunpike’s Storefront program October 2022-January 2023.

Willowtail for the Third Time

I recently completed a third visit to Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve near Mancos, Colorado. (See also Colorado-Utah-Colorado and Willowtail Springs Residency.) It was a very productive time for me: I was able to complete three of my individual portraits of burned trees in relatively few but long and intense days, compared to what it takes me at home.

Winter Rim (above Playa Summer Lake, Oregon), watercolor on torn paper, 52″ x 16″W

Telegraph Canyon, a Zion tree (watercolor on torn paper, 52″H x 13″W

Goodell Creek Cedar (North Cascades), watercolor on torn paper, 52″H x 43″W

The cedar on the right is the largest burned tree I’ve done yet; at its base it’s nearly as wide as it’s tall, and presents a raft of new storage and presentation problems to solve : – ).

I did a few hikes in the Lizard Head Wilderness with its first few inches of snow, and managed to start a few small landscapes from those hikes as well. I got together with my collaborator Lorena Willams, who wrote the stories that appear in the “State of the Forest” installation now on tour.

While there, I wrote this short essay on the value of their residency program:

What is the value of an artist residency to an artist?

It is the opportunity to think and work surrounded by peace and beauty — with very little distraction.[1] Like any traveler, being in a new or less familiar place is refreshing and liberating; seeing new sights can literally change a point of view. For an artist, this can result in fixed ideas or long-term directions being altered or upended or in others a renewed commitment to a body of work.

For me, three visits to Willowtail have been primarily the latter. I have two bodies of work relevant to its southwest Colorado environment – an eleven-year series of large paintings of individual burned trees and a three-year series of artist books about bark beetles, using the wood and bark of their target trees as medium. Since these are preoccupations for much of the region, I found not only a personal welcome but professional interest in the work.

What is the impact of the residency on the artist and more widely?

Something I have experienced in every residency is some surprise I could not have predicted. Two years ago, Willowtail received a Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation grant to foster a collaboration. I was paired together with Durango author and wildland firefighter Lorena Williams, enriching and deepening the burned tree body of work. Her stories, together with my paintings, have resulted in several exhibitions not only in traditional art venues, like galleries and museums,[2] but also in downtown storefronts[3] and community centers.[4]

Some 30 of these paintings have been digitally printed on three layers of fabric: a transparent, a solid and a black or black-plus-text layer with Lorena’s stories on half of them. This installation, called “State of the Forest,” is currently touring regional art and science museums around the U.S. and Canada for the next 2.5 years.[5]

Why do you come back to Willowtail?

I’ve already mentioned peace and beauty. The quirky décor, living conscientiously on the land, and facilitation in the local art community are also appreciated. But more importantly, Peggy and Lee Cloy offer something unusual in the artist residency world: deep personal interest. In large programs an artist can feel a bit  like a transfer student in an overcrowded high school. Here the sense of belief and support of the specific individual’s endeavor is appreciative, consistent and tangible.

[1] By my estimate, I am ~200-250% more productive than in my own studio.

[2] Plasteel Gallery, Seattle; Arnica Gallery, Kamloops BC; Lake Country Gallery, Vernon BC; US Botanical Museum, Washington DC; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner WA; San Juan Islands Museum of Art, Friday Harbor, WA; Kirkland Arts Center, Kirkland WA; Green River College, WA; Seattle City Hall, WA and others.

[3] Shunpike Storefront grant, amazon HQ Republican Street windows, Seattle; summer 2018. See https://storefrontsseattle.com/ near the end of the page.

[4] “Conversations through the Smoke” toured small towns in Idaho as part of a University of Idaho/US Forest Service community fire resiliency campaign. https://www.nrfirescience.org/event/conversations-through-smoke-traveling-art-exhibition

[5] The itinerary is here: https://www.davidjwagnerllc.com/Environmental_Impact-Sequel.html