Sometimes I'm casting about for an artist to talk about and find one really close to home - my friend Christopher Harris creates his art with a pinhole camera - these are long exposure photos made with a lens-less camera. They have a moody, intriguing blurred quality that takes them away from realism toward Rothko country (that's kind of to the north of Marlboro country, minus the carcinogenics). As he explains, "His landscapes and seascapes are meditations on transcendence, a quality Americans have associated with the West for two hundred years."

His latest series will be exhibited at Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle beginning June 3rd. They are part of his Skagit Series focussing on twilight views of abandoned boats, winter trees, and other shapes barely visible in the fading light. (You'll have to go in person; I have no images yet to post.)

Above is Canola Field. This was taken in Nez Perce County in Eastern Washington.

And here's Rodeo, taken with a small, pocket-size camera, left intentionally with this grainy, scratched look. I'm not sure why, but I seem to prefer images that require some scrutiny, that are not easy to assess with a quick glance.


I really like the movement and the spontaneity of this one. Living in the Northwest, I think gray has become my favorite color by default or osmosis.

I like the way pinhole photography magically reduces the world to its simplest elements of color and shape. I don't know enough about it to figure out how many decisions are still left for the artist. Do you know?

"I Am Not a Colorist." Mark Rothko

In Mark Rothko, a compilation of writings about the artist, author Jeffrey Weiss quotes the artist as saying that it was "not color, but measures" that were of the greatest importance to him. Obviously he was good at using color for his purposes and had thought a good deal about the effect he wanted his paintings to have on the viewer. He even specified that he'd like viewers to stand 18" from the paintings while looking at them.

In 1949 he went everyday to MOMA in New York after the museum acquired Matisse's The Red Studio so he could stand before it. "You become that color. You become totally saturated with it." Here it is. I guess you could try to get close to the screen but that might not help too much:




Are you a colorist? Does the mere act of trying on a label for a while work to prod you in that direction with your work? Does it feel too late now, in 2009, to talk about such labels? Is everyone "supposed" to be doing hybrid, multi-media, performance-based works involving found objects and/or bimorphic figures? (I remember going to a workshop as many as 3 years ago and being told to avoid using the already worn-out "bimorphic" in an artist statement. I didn't even know what it meant.)

Is your work more closely connected to the work of painters from 20 - 40 years ago, like mine, and does some of your work hark back as far as Bonnard and Vuillard? Does that make it somehow less valid? What do you think?