Sea Cliffs 7 Photograph

I live in the woods in northern California looking out across the San Francisco Bay towards the hills of Marin, San Francisco and Angel Island. The distant blue hills of my “Faraway Hills” series are ever-present fixtures in my real life. Down below is the bay and above is an endless web of tree branches. Their silhouettes have etched themselves into my memory. My paintings and prints are always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic. Having spent a decade as a printmaker making woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, aquatints and monotypes, my mind works in monochrome. I focus on a single color, composition, positive and negative space, pattern, lines and shape. I currently work in two mediums, acrylic painting and cyanotypes, a form of camera-less photography. Cyanotypes are a 19th century form of lensless photography also known as photograms, blueprints and sun prints. They resemble block prints or etchings but use no ink nor printing press. Light “etches” the image on paper I had painted with light-sensitive chemicals. MY NEWEST SERIES OF ABSTRACT CYANOTYPES: My technique is a form of experimental photography, much like the action painters Morris Louis, who poured his veil paintings, or Jackson Pollock who dripped and drizzled his. My abstract cyanotypes are luminous like watercolor paintings but are actually photographs. Each is a multiple-exposure lensless photograph make through deliberate movements of the light-sensitive paper during exposure to light. 

Different sections of the paper were exposed to light for a longer or shorter time, yielding multiple shades of blue. Each abstract cyanotype is entirely unique. These same lines, shapes and shades of blue cannot be recreated as the exposure of the paper was heavily manipulated by me during each printing.

 A traditional single-exposure cyanotype yields a white silhouette against a dark blue background. But instead of creating a white image by blocking light with solid objects on the light-sensitive paper, I used water to block the light, creating subtle gradations of darkening blue as I submerged the light-sensitive paper for different carefully timed exposures under water, turning, bending and lifting the paper as needed to shape the lines before they become permanently etched by the sun’s light. My botanical cyanotypes are each unique monotypes as well. They are slow camera-less photographs made outdoors using natural light and no film negative.