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
Drift Ice: Loss and Change Read More »
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
Art Supplies and International Ordering Read More »
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
Location Independent Read More »
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
The Unexpected Alchemist Read More »
A few weeks ago a friend told me an uncomfortable thing. She said (names changed) “Gabe isn’t taking pictures anymore. He told me there was no point. He’ll never be as good as you. He still wants to hang out with you and go hiking with you, he just doesn’t want to take photographs.” More
Most of the thinking work in creating a cyanotype lies in making a digital negative from an existing image. This… is not easy. Once you get past all the testing to determine your max blue which tells you the length of exposure time, to figure out what the proper curve is to deliver a correctly
The Digital Negative Read More »
Ultramarine. Cobalt. Indigo. Lapis. Sapphire. Navy. The list of names for blue is nearly endless. Across gender and ethnicity, blue is most people’s favorite color. My heart was captured by the blue fire of arctic ice – a color so intense, so strange, it was difficult for me to believe it was real. That is
How do you have a creative life? The good news is that there is no wrong answer. The bad news is it’s not easy. I believe that the single most important requirement to have any success in the arts, and by arts I mean anything that is a creative effort whether it’s writing or photography
Working the Creative Life Read More »