Last week my solo show, Portraits of Nature, opened at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks. I promised to share some of the work here so that people who can’t make it to Fairbanks can get a glimpse of the show. It’s always best to see work in person. Also Colleen Firmin Thomas, who has a show next to me in the same gallery, has beautiful mixed media paintings that are well worth seeing!

My solo show at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks opens this week. I will be adding a blog post about show soon, so that if you can't make it to Fairbanks to see the work in person, you can get an idea of what I've put together. In the meantime, if you are in Fairbanks I'd be honored for you to join me for the following events:

• Artist's Lecture: Thursday, August 3rd at 7 pm in the Blue Room
• Opening Reception: Friday, August 4th, 5-7 pm at the Bear Gallery

Since last fall I’ve been making cyanotypes from my drawings, which I’ve written about here a few times over the past year. It’s a work in progress, which I am continuing to develop, but I wanted to share some of what I have finished so far, and some of my thoughts behind it. This collection of images, Encounters with the Spirit World, is a series of cyanotype prints of animals and plants that are spiritually significant to me. In creating the drawings that I print from, and the handling of the printing process, I try to connect with the soul and essence of my subjects.

Like the engineers of the pre-digital age, I was also looking for a low-cost and relatively simple way to reproduce my drawings. I like the idea of blueprints because they still feel handmade and I can use the outside environment (sun and water) to make them. I’ve written several posts about how I started experimenting with cyanotypes during an artist residency with Joshua Tree National Park. In this post I wanted to focus more on the process I’ve been using.

I completed a double major in studio art and environmental studies with a focus in conservation biology in 2008, and decided to do my thesis in art. We could choose if we wanted to do a thesis or not and I was really looking forward to having my own studio and basically getting to do whatever I wanted with artwork for an entire year. That seemed like a lot of fun, and sure it was, but I think it was also one of my hardest classes ever. 

Last year I wrote an end of year post summarizing many of the projects that I worked on, I want to do something similar again because I haven’t been diligent about documenting my work online. In 2016 I got to try some new things (like illustrating a coloring book and teaching in Savoonga) and I’m excited to share that with you. I also have some ideas for this year that I’m excited to talk about.

This fall I was selected to be one of six artists to spend three weeks as a resident at the Lost Horse Ranger Cabin in Joshua Tree National Park. Let me say here that it would be easier to write an artists blog about successes, and finished pieces. However what I really enjoy reading about is the process and the struggle to get to that point of creating finished work. A part of me wanted to save this post for later, when I had more time to finish what I started during my artist residency. Then you could see the end result and probably part of the story of how I got there. But today I am sharing the story of unfinished work.