Musician and Centrum Creative Resident Marc Fendel just completed a residency using the Dan Harpole Cistern here at Fort Worden (and its 44 second reverberation) as a recording and musical instrument.
Marc sent us a link to a brief video clip of Kevin Nortness playing banjo in the Cistern during the residency. Marc tells us that they also recorded in HD. We can't wait to see that.
[Video of Kevin Nortness playing banjo.]
Creative resident and visual artist Kim Kopp was interviewed recently by fellow artist Counsel Langley over on our Visual Arts site.The result is a fascinating look 'behind the scenes' of an artist's process. Read the whole thing.
After receiving serious shrapnel wounds in Vietnam and spending six months in the hospital at Fort 
Dix, New Jersey, twenty-three-year-old Russell Jaqua went searching for himself by traveling to Africa. The following is an excerpt from an early entry of his journal, written as he journeyed by boat from the Canary Islands to Spanish Sahara.
December 26, 1970
I hold onto the hope that if I keep trucking and am not turned around or put down, I will find my place in the sun, my niche. I know that it is up to me to find it and that there is no guarantee and that it is not easy to find. I have known for some time just how incredibly low man can go. No one can experience a war and not know. What I have learned in Viet Nam is that there is nothing between me and the bottom, but my own will. The Big Question is what am I going to do with myself in regards to a vocation. At one time in my life, not so very long ago, it seemed to me that this question would more or less work itself out. But so far, I have decided on nothing particular. I cannot say I want to be an X when I grow up.
But I have come up with a few requirements:
1. that it does not leave me in a corner.
2. that it involves an element of beauty.
3. that I work for myself.
4. that it supplements travel.
5. it doesn’t necessarily have to make me rich.
6. involves a certain amount of physical labor.
7. that it enables me to be close to nature.
Artist-blacksmith Russell Jaqua, a leading artist in what came to be known as The New Iron Age of the American Craft Movement, was often asked to discuss his primary influences.
Jaqua’s response always included the extraordinary residency that Centrum provided him early in his career—a residency which hallowed him to develop the unique vocabulary and style of smithing that impacted an entire generation of artist-smiths and helped create a new genre of forged metal sculpture.
Jaqua came to his craft relatively late in life.
In Europe, blacksmith apprentices begin training early in their teen years. Jaqua’s route was far more circuitous. Before reporting to Army boot camp in 1968, he’d hitched from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Alaska to Mexico, knowing he might never get the chance to see North America again.
Continue reading "Forged in Fire: The Explorations of Artist-Blacksmith Russell Jaqua " »
One of visual artist Elise Morris’s current projects is paintings on small blocks of wood, which get wrapped with cellophane and sold out of cigarette vending machines as part of the “Art-o-mat” project. The project is based on the premise of taking art, “repackaging” it, and making it part of the daily lives of consumers. Art vended from the machine can be anything small enough to fit through the dispensing apparatus.
Morris, who grew up in Torrence, California (just outside of Los Angeles), attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she double-majored in art and environmental education. Her environmental education training fed into a two-year Peace Corps stint in the Dominican Republic where she spent much of her time painting murals in schools and community buildings.
“In developing countries, the environment is often the last thing on anybody’s mind,” Morris says.
She did a lot of painting, instead.
“The classroom walls were concrete, so you couldn’t hang anything,” she says. “So I’d paint them, instead. Maps, the water cycle, vowels, numbers, letters, the alphabet. The teachers all wanted me come to their classrooms to paint these murals.”
Morris also painted murals in public spaces of Villa Fundación de Baní, the town she was in.
When she returned to the United States, she moved to the Bay Area, receiving her MFA in art from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley in 2005.
Morris’s training in environmental education helps her to paint from the inspiration of shapes in nature. “It’s amazing how fascinating they can be,” Morris says. “I’m interested in the color, and the shapes, and the emotional quality. Beyond just the biology.”
Morris, who works in oils, acrylic, and other mixed-media, exhibits work at multiple galleries in the Bay Area and been commissioned for work hung in hotels and in private collections. Recently, she’s been working primarily from photos of the natural world in which change is happening—decay or bloom, or the change of seasons. She uses them as a starting point for her paintings. But she doesn’t plan where she’s going to end up.
“I find my way to the end,” she says, “and see where it takes me. Generally all I have is the format—the size of the canvas.
“There is beauty along the edges of what we notice,” Morris says. “So much detail goes unseen. Nature has the most intense shapes. In your head it’s contained, and expected. But working from the actual natural world, and working from what you see rather than what you think you see, you find the unexpected.”
Morris will be presenting her first solo show in September, at the Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, California. The show will be made up of new work directly influenced by her experience at Centrum. Image pictured above is Emulate Spring, acrylic and oil on canvas, 24” x 36”, 2007.
Some writers pick pen names in order to write with a greater sense of freedom.
Some writers, like Centrum creative resident Dennis Dybeck, pick them because they work as a bill collector.
Dybeck selected the pseudonym Art Beck in his early twenties, when he worked for a bill-collecting agency. "The collection manager told us “no one’s mother raised them to be a bill collector. To do the things I’m going to want you to do, you need to pick a phony name,” Dybeck says. He selected the named "Art Beck." Later, when he turned to writing poetry, he kept it as a nom de plume.
Continue reading "Found in Translation: The Poetry of Art Beck" »
Diane Wilkinson's work centers on big skies. The Harris Gallery in Houston notes that "The land or water is an abstract footnote to the paintings, overwhelmed by the size and scope of the skies." The daughter of an oilman, (and now married to one), Wilkinson has lived all over the world, but always under the same sky. "The clouds draw our attention into their dark centers," the Houston Gallery notes, "where raw power and energy is offset by whimsical wisps of sunlit vapor away from the stormy center." 
The August, 2007, issue of Experience magazine will feature an article on Wilkinson and her work. (Top image is "Denver Wheatfield," oil on canvas, 48 x 60. Side image is a skyscape of Kinsey Beach at Fort Worden State Park.)
Courtney Westcott was a Centrum Creative Resident in both 2006 and 2007. Her main focus is the baroque flute, the precursor to the silver flute. The baroque flute was the flute of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe: a continent caught between the old monarchies and the new, revolutionary ideas of science 
and liberty. Unlike the silver flute, the baroque flute is made of wood, and has a “gorgeous, sensual, vocal sound,” says Westcott, who fell in love with the instrument while a student at Oberlin in the early nineteen-seventies. “It has a lot of colors and dimensions,” she says. “The way it plays when you play the Bach sonata, for example, has a greater subtlety of articulation than does the silver flute.”
The study of early music and musical instruments has now become mainstream, but as recently as 1975, places to study baroque instruments were scarce. Courtney Westcott went to The Hague, which was at that time a central location for studying early music. She stayed for five years, teaching in a music school to support herself—in that way becoming fluent in Dutch. She later became the first woman to receive a Soloist Diploma on the baroque flute from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
Westcott currently makes her home in Seattle, and plays the flute both as a soloist and in orchestras. She is a founding member of Zephyrus, a group devoted to late eighteenth-century repertoire. Together with flutemaker Peter Noy, she collaborates on the research and development of flutes based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century originals.
