Searching for Form – Summer 2025
September 2, 2025
This has been another full year of travels, yet we spent the summer quietly at home in Seattle. In the spring our journeys took us to Japan, Washington, D.C., southern Italy, and through the canyon lands of Utah and Arizona. After so much movement, a summer at home felt perfectly timed.
My daily rhythm is simple but grounding: coffee to start the day (naturally), reading, and long walks along the Edmonds waterfront, where I watch the tides shift and the ferries glide in and out. I often pause at a favorite café or two, sometimes visiting with friends along the way.
This summer’s reading included a couple books on travels in Africa, which sparked the imagined drawings I’ve been making of Malian architecture.
I have an ongoing interest in the mound builder cultures up the Mississippi Valley. This book is full of diagrams, sitemaps, aerial geometry and pottery from the areas. My drawing is a collection of things taken from the book diagrams.
I’ve deliberately stepped away from my usual sketching to explore form and composition more directly. These studies often grow out of real scenes—the waterfront at Coupeville, or the industrial pipes and machinery at Pike Place Market—but I approach them less as finished works than as exercises in seeing and structure. They may, in time, serve as templates for acrylic paintings. For now, I’m content to let them remain explorations.
Edmonds Waterfront was created on the beach, looking toward the ferry terminal, the remnants of an old dock, the covered yacht club, sailboat masts, and the shifting water. The composition aims less to capture a literal scene than to evoke the atmosphere of the place—an approach reminiscent of the American abstract expressionist painter Stuart Davis.
Tides in Coupeville is a collage of interwoven forms drawn from the waterfront buildings and moorage dock, but rendered in a freer, more imaginative style.
Form Fishing takes its shapes from the industrial pipes, boilers, and apparatus along the side of Pike Place Market, as viewed from the waterfront.
A couple photo references.
