“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

This year’s pigment prints on paper are all black and white. I print them on thin, translucent, Japanese Kozo paper which imparts a subtle tone to the photographs of island locales.

Additionally, I’ve made two large color images, printed by a dye sublimation process on aluminum. Both are abstract expressions of the island’s unique natural environment.

I’ve have taken a hiatus from making gilded vellum prints to continue my study of the 19th Century Cyanotype process. After nearly two decades of making inkjet prints, lightning struck a couple of years ago when rereading Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “The Blue of Distance,” which initiated a deep dive into cyanotypes, and an obsessive “Exploration in Blue.” The history of the cyanotype process as both a means of documenting the physical world and a means of metaphoric expression appeals to me. And, while I still make the cyanotype Water Marks prints I introduced last year, my focus this year has shifted to making contact prints in the darkroom.

These cyanotype contact prints are a product of my fall down the Prussian blue rabbit hole and the direct result of a quote I read as I researched the process. “No one but a vandal would print a landscape…in cyanotype.” Lyle Rexer cites this assertion by 19th century photographer P.H. Emerson in his book, “Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde, the New Wave in Old Processes.” Well, why not be a vandal!

Working from digital negatives, I infuse my prints with a sense of the everydayness of perception as filtered through a personal interpretive process. Some of the prints are made from new photographs, some from my archive. All are made using the traditional cyanotype formula that is hand applied on Hahnemuehle Platinum Rag paper. A negative is placed over the sensitized paper, exposed in a UV exposure unit, and then developed, fixed, and dried.