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.]
Novelist Debra Magpie Earling is in residence at Centrum until February 15. Born in Spokane, Washington, Earling grew up in Montana as a part of the Bitterroot Salish Tribe, and she is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Polson, Montana.
Growing up, Earling heard stories about her Aunt Louise, the woman who would later become the focus of her novel Perma Red. At eighteen, Earling became the first public defender in the Tribal Justice System on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. After two years of working in the Tribal Justice System, she left the state to go to college.
Earling attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she became interested in writing. She achieved her Bachelor of Arts in English, which she completed in 1986 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, graduating magna cum laude. As a Ford Doctoral Fellow, she studied at Cornell University in New York from 1988-91, where she graduated with a Masters in English. She went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction in 1992 at Cornell. From 1991 to 1998, Earling held positions in both Native American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. Currently, she is an associate professor in the English Department there and teaches fiction and Native American Studies full-time.
Although Earling has published many short stories, Perma Red is her first novel and has been receiving critical acclaim and awards ever since its release in 2002.
Earling is also an avid speaker for Native American writers, and she is often a guest at college writing symposiums around the country. She has an article appearing in the upcoming March issue of Experience magazine exploring questions of language and identity.
Theresa Lovering-Brown is a visual artist who teaches in the Monterey Peninsula College jewelry and metal arts program. She grew up in the Bay Area. As an art student in the nineteen-seventies, she studied the essential elements of art—texture, dimension, elements, and the principals of design—and began to work in metalwork, “which is not completely environmentally friendly,” Lovering-Brown says, laughing. Recently, she’s started to use recycled materials, such as tin cans and mesh wire, in place of new metals and wires in her work.
She also creates works with a political edge. Recent pieces explore the effects of the Iraq war, the
mismanagement of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, and the situation of migrant farm laborers.
For over a decade, commuting in the Monterey Bay region of California, Lovering-Brown daily drove by hundreds of acres of farmland, where she saw migrant farm laborers toiling in conditions that ranged from damp, bone-chilling weather to scorching mid-day heat, with no shade or shelter to escape the sun.
"In winter, the fields become a muddy quagmire," she says. "In summer, the weather can be intensely hot, sun burning and yet the workers must pick, plant, pull, load crates, and spray pesticides, the poisons needed for farm land production."
“I have seen helicopters fly over the fields and spray pesticides,” she says. “And later that day the migrant workers are out in the same field working the crops.”
She points out that the large agribusiness farms are not your traditional family farms.
“When I drive by conventional strawberry fields on a nice sunny day around noon and there is no wind blowing, I have to close my car windows,” she says. “Conventional strawberries have high amounts of toxic pesticides, including captan, benomyl, vinclozolin, iprodione, and endosulfan.”
Her research and questions led to a sequence of pieces inspired by her observations. 
“Imagine what these carcinogenic materials are doing to the farm laborers picking these luscious-looking strawberries,” Lovering-Brown says. “The long term side effects of these pesticides have not been studied or proven. Who knows what effect this will have on our bodies?"
Lovering-Brown notes that art isn’t the only way of taking a stand. “Taking political action is sometimes more valid than making a piece of art,” she says. “It has to do with who you are as a person. You can’t sit back anymore. If things mean enough to us, we work them into our lives and our art.”
Lovering-Brown uses a journal to develop ideas. “As I’m writing and drawing, ideas start coming,” she says.
“Reflections and contemplation. If I get paralyzed about what I’m going to do, I just go into my studio and do what I have my students do. If you don’t have an idea, you just go to your studio and clean. You’ll start moving pieces around, picking them up and putting them down, and it’ll get your energy moving and you’ll be able to start working.”
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.
“I’m a sucker for anniversaries,” composer Bruce Trinkley says. “You name it. Whenever a centennial comes along, I want to be a part of it.”
Trinkley's current project is setting ten of poet Theodore Roethke's poems to music. Roethke, who was born in 1908, taught for awhile at Penn State, where Trinkley teaches. All of the poems that Trinkley has selected come from Roetke's first collection, Open House, published when Roethke was at Penn State.
"I like centennials because they attract so much attention," Trinkley says. "They shine the spotlight on the person once again."
When setting poems, Trinkley follows his gut reaction. Is there something in the language (what the poet is saying and how he's saying it) that attracts him? "You need to believe strongly in the poem if you're going to set it to music," Trinkley says. "At some point it becomes almost a collaboration. Setting a poem is like a reading, with notes and rhythms. And if you're going to work so closely with it, you have to believe in the material."
Trinkley doesn't pick and choose stanzas. "If I can’t set the whole poem, I'll find another poem," he says. He notes that writing for the voice is like writing for different instruments. He starts by reading the poem out loud a number of times, to find the natural rhythms of the piece and the melody of the words.
"Some poems ask to be read quietly," Trinkley says. "Others shout to the masses and call for a full concert choir and an orchestra."
For Vashon Island-based artist Darsie Beck, it's impossible to separate his creative work from the rest of 
his life.
Beck is a watercolor painter, stone carver, and landscape designer who works out of his studio on Maury Island. He also teaches creativity and journal keeping workshops throughout the Puget Sound region.
He is a proponent of daily journal keeping and for many years has made it a part of his morning ritual. Beck feels that the process of writing first thing every morning allows him to clear his mind and create a sense of order for the up coming day.
He writes in a free-flowing, unedited manner, and has found that writing helps solve problems, organize 
time around things that matter most and add structure and overall effectiveness to his life. A part of his morning routine also includes sketching and painting from nature.
He uses a day planner system that holds his appointment schedule and daily journal.
"Our world is fast paced and we are busier then ever. We have become a society of doers with little time for personal reflection, or simply being." Beck says.
Beck is currently assembling a collection of his sketches, paintings and journal entries into a book-length work. He says, "I want to share my experience in journal keeping, the daily routine I follow and the exercises I employ to engage my creativity. I hope to inspire others to discover their own uniqueness through the rich and rewarding process of journal keeping."
Wanted: Artists for a Centrum visual artists residency. Now artists who want the time and space to pursue their work at Centrum can apply for a grant to cover the weekly fee.
Max and Sherry Grover of the Max Grover Gallery, Teresa Verraes-Landis of Artisans on Taylor, and visual artist and Centrum community member Karen Hackenberg are putting the first monies into the fund. If you're an interested artist and/or funder, please contact Centrum Residency Coordinator Sally Rodgers at 360.385.3102, x128 for more details on how to apply and get involved!
"It's another way to contribute to the growth of the visual arts in Port Townsend," Sherry Grover says.
Tenor saxophonist Eric Barber hung out at Centrum last week, working on new compositions. Eric, who also plays soprano sax ("it's like an alter ego," he says), integrates influences from jazz, Balkan, and 
Indian styles in his work. He often improvises in 5/8, 7/8, 9/8, and 11/8 metered rhythms, superimposing those meters on other rhythms and styles.
A Pacific Northwest native, Eric lived for seven years in Los Angeles, working with musicians from all over the world. He and his wife recently moved to Seattle in order to raise their children away from the Los Angeles smog, and Eric has become an integral part of the Northwest jazz scene.
To those just starting out in jazz, Eric says, "Listening is number one. Develop a focused and disciplined routine. And don't be afraid to explore other genres. If you want to play Coldplay in your jazz band, then do it!"
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.
When Susan Silverman talks about painting in the Pacific Northwest, she talks about the light. “It’s a filtered light,” she says. “There’s a softness to it, from the clouds. It can rain all day but at the end of the day the light is there, coming through, beneath the clouds, down low.”
Silverman, a New Hampshire-based potter and painter who studied pottery in Japan, says that “Pottery is held in that culture as a high form of art, like sculpture or painting would be in this country. There’s a sense and sensibility about the functional daily rituals of life, closely related with the vessels that you use. There is a presentation, and textures and shapes, and a certain understated look to Japanese art that is unique. And those are the kinds of things I look for, in my own work. I am trying to say more with less.”
Silverman heard about the Centrum creative residency program from a friend, Mayumi Tsutakawa, whom she had met in Japan. They had both grown up in Seattle, but never met. (“I went to Garfield,” Silverman says. “She went to Franklin. A different world. I would never have gotten to know her if we hadn’t gone to the same study program in Kyoto.”)
Much of Silverman’s work concerns bringing out the feelings that objects and
landscapes evoke. “For some reason, the whole time at Fort Worden I was using deep blue or this incredible reddish orange,” she says. “Real emotional colors that weren’t necessarily related to the subject matter of what I was printing.” Silverman adds that “the process of the work is important to me—the little anomalies that come up, the places where you can’t quite control everything. Those are the places that I look for expression.”
Nature served as a constant companion during artist Elisabetta Bastai’s childhood. She and her younger 
brother would often visit several horses that her parents’ friends kept in a mountain field in northern Italy. When her brother died of leukemia, at the age of seven, she went back to that field. There was only one horse left, a gray mare called Luna. In a subtle, unconscious way, she says, her connection to that horse became a connection to her brother. As Bastai began drawing, her first work was of horses.
After that, her bond with nature intensified. Every summer she explored and hiked in the mountains and snorkeled off the Tuscan coast. Bastai collected plants and seashells and began to take landscape photographs and experiment with oil paint. In her late twenties, she moved to Ireland and ended up working at a riding stable. She kept drawing in her spare time. A year later, she moved to Scotland and began to paint in acrylics.
Nature landscapes feature prominently in Bastai’s work. Experiences as a professional photographer in Bangalore, India, and work in Washington state at the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest led her to start asking questions about how people relate to the landscape. “I’m fascinated by the contrasting ways that people see nature,” she says. “For example, looking at the different relationship that the Native Americans and the pioneers had with the forests. How do people relate to landscape? Why do people interfere the way they do?”
One of Bastai’s art forms is a series of drawings that she called “maps,” a cross between a naturalist’s journal and a personal diary in which text and images intermingle. “When you experience a landscape, you experience it with more than your eyes,” she says. “You experience smells and sounds that trigger thoughts and memories. I found that by including text into my drawings I was able to add things I could not include by painting alone.” Bastai also continues to sketch and paint landscapes in a more traditional way. In 2004, her interest in horses re-emerged in a series of drawings entitled Poseidon’s Horses. In this body of work she explores relationships between landscape and myth, and combines her memories of the Mediterranean Sea with the colors and forms of the Pacific Northwest.
As a writer, twenty-six-year-old Ben Moorad knew that writing could be a powerful force in changing lives. In order to make it accessible to a greater community, he co-founded Write Around Portland, a network of writing groups for people who couldn’t access writing or community because of income, isolation, or other barriers. Write Around Portland, which is now in its seventh year, offers people the opportunity to write and have their writing heard in a supportive, safe environment.
“When you hear the stories of someone different from yourself, and put yourself in their shoes, you have a greater capacity for empathy,” Moorad says. “You’re also more likely to protect their freedoms in other areas.”
The workshops last for ten-week periods, and focus on generating new writing, as well as the revision of existing writing. At the end of the ten weeks, all of the workshop groups come together for a public reading of their work. Katrina survivors, people affected by HIV/AIDS, survivors of domestic violence, seniors in foster care, Vietnam War vets, sexual minority youth, and other groups read and listen to one another.
“If people are given the space to express their fears, their desires, their fantasies, and their histories, it has an inherently humanizing effect,” Moorad says. “Speaking and listening to each other, in community, helps us recognize one another’s innate humanity.” Moorad gives as an example the term “welfare queens,” saying: “If you don’t actually know anybody on welfare, terms like that shape your thinking. But if you know or speak with someone on welfare, you know that isn’t their experience. And once you’ve heard their stories, you can’t reduce them to stereotypes.”
Write Around Portland has run over two hundred and forty ten-week workshops, and has helped nearly two thousand people access writing in community. Enrollment in the Write Around Portland workshops is currently overflowing. The program is trying to increase the number of workshops offered.
Watching television one evening, screenwriter—and 2006 Centrum creative resident—Jason Cortlund saw a news report about old-growth Douglas firs that were being “poached” in the middle of the night. The poachers would sell the wood to buy methamphetamines. Cortlund, who had grown up near Salem, Oregon, was familiar with the story. “I knew the picture, what it was like to be poor, under pressure, and macho,” he says. Research led to the script Lumberjunkies, one of two feature-length film projects that Cortlund is developing.
Cortlund’s first film, Nightstand, in which a U.S. Army helicopter mechanic embarks on an affair with an officer’s wife, played on the festival circuit in 2002. The project was completed with his partner, Julia Halperin, with whom Cortlund has been writing and filming since 1996. Their work has screened widely at film festivals and cinemas across North America and Europe.
Their current work is the Interstate project, a series of short video experiments designed around circus footage at an encampment alongside a busy Texas highway. The shorts critique surveillance. Part One focuses on footage of caged zoo animals—elephants and zebras—while tracers from passing automobile traffic flash across the screen. Part Two is rife with contemporary resonance, featuring a pop song from Iraq—with a gunfire-inspired beat—as the soundtrack for a caged tiger dance video. Part Three is in the process of being edited; Cortlund visualizes a piece that critiques the current vogue of media sensationalism.
