Cyanotypes are one of the earliest methods for putting a photographic image on paper. Sir John Herschel experimented in 1842 with a method of coating paper with light-sensitive iron salts, exposing the paper to sunlight, and then washing with water. The result was a cyanotype, named for one of the chemicals used, potassium ferricyanide, which […]
Cyanotype: The Arctic Blue Read More »
We are inundated by pictures. We make them. We share them. We see them. An estimated 5 billion photographs are taken every day. Mostly with phones. They’re shared widely. 6.9 billion images a year are shared on WhatsApp. 1.3 billion go out on Instagram. More than 1 billion on all the rest of social media.
Everyone is a Photographer Read More »
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ‘ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass AI is altering the artistic
Art, Photography, and AI Read More »
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.
The Iceland Residency Read More »
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
Persistence of Vision Read More »
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.
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 »
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.
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 »