July Exhibit on Vashon Island
Drawn from sketchbooks and illustrated journals depicting scenes from home and abroad, punctuated with flights of imagination and coffee spills.
Vashon Island. Sierra Nevadas. California coast. Japan. New England. Greece. El Salvador. Covid-inspired dreamscapes.
Visit the gallery if you can: Snapdragon Cafe is open Friday-Sunday, and the exhibit runs until August 5.
Or, browse the galleries below. Many of the images are available as print-on-demand in a variety of formats. If you would like a different option than what is available on the Purchase page, you can contact me at drjenhs@gmail.com to place an order.
Gallery 1: Pacific Northwest/Dreamscapes
Collateral Visions (Samhain) Fall 2020 Dripped tea, ink, watercolor, oil crayon and graphite on watercolor paper
Chicken Dinner Watercolor, liner pen
Waiting for the Ferry Watercolor, graphite, liner pen
Willapa Bay, WA Summer 2019 Gouache on Cold Press Watercolor paper
If Turnips Were Watches Liner pen, watercolor
Rabbit Moon Fall 2019 Watercolor, liner pen
The Magical Sea Chapel winter 2020 Watercolor, Graphite, Liner pen
Samurai Noodle Fall, 2017 Watercolor crayon, liner pen, felt tip marker
Cross Orb Weaver, Nasturtiums Dripped tea, ink, watercolor, liner pen and graphite on watercolor paper
Gallery 2: Japan/other travel
Dedication/Artist’s Statement
We would be in a shop, looking at art, or in a gallery. “You could do that.” She’d say, “you know you could.” For a long time, I couldn’t quite identify why this refrain bothered me. After all, she had unshakable faith in my ability. Finally, I found it: “I could. But I’ve chosen to do something different.” For mom, life was all infinite possibility. She really didn’t consider, or care much, how one set of choices might constrain other options. It was deeply affirming, and also a little sad, as if the thing I was in front of her wasn’t quite exciting enough.
Artist’s statement
Technically, most of this is not “proper” art, in the sense of independent works, conceived and executed for the sole purpose of display.
Nor are they, despite the title of this exhibit, “sketches” in the traditional meaning of that term. A sketch is the rough beginning of something else, and virtually none of the images in my “sketchbooks” make that transition. They are satisfied to be, as they are, within the pages of a book, and I’m satisfied with that arrangement too.
I tend to call these “illustrated journals,” but they really aren’t that either. I’m a compulsive journal-writer, but in spite of many efforts to merge my two methods of record keeping together—because I really do love the idea—somehow, the words want to keep to themselves in one journal and the pictures feel the same about the company they keep in another.
I first began travel sketches/illustrations in 1984, when I was a college student on an overseas trip to the UK. I bought a Bristol board sketchbook in a London art store, a pan of cheap watercolors, and used the Koh-i-noor rapidograph, my then-favorite writing instrument, for line images. As an introvert who prefers sitting in one place to wearing one’s self out on pre-arranged tours, I would slip away from the latter and park myself somewhere visually interesting and doodle away. That pleasure continues to haunt me wherever I go.
Lately, a vast, international practice of “urban sketching” has grown up and out of here—Seattle’s Gabi Campanario and Stephanie Bower being key founders of that movement. From time to time, I like to join in with such sketchers, but they are very strict about not using photography as the basis of images. Contrarily, I find that sometimes I prefer a branch of apple blossoms to the hindquarters of the SUV in my actual vision, or to collage a bit of chopstick wrapper into my doodle. So, technically (again), most of what I do is not urban sketching per se, though I admire and follow and learn from many prominent artists in that vein.
Whatever you’d like to call the original versions of these prints, I hope they bring you a fraction of the pleasure and joy they’ve brought to me. Better yet, I hope they inspire you to start your own visual practice, whatever you think your abilities are or are not. I was talked out of having the images “cleaned up” for the show. So, every drip of coffee, every errant line, every color test patch in the corner is there to remind you that perfection can only be the enemy of progress. In this world of impossible, artificially-generated standards, may the wobbly wabi sabi line of the human effort be a humble antidote to return us back to our frail and precious reality.