Molly Hashimoto

North Cascades Painters

Today I am featuring a few of the student paintings from the recent workshop I taught, Pacific Northwest by Brush, at the North Cascades Institute. To the left is Beverly Choltco-Devlin's light-filled painting of two mighty trees in the forest beside the Environmental Learning Center. I admire the watery style, where colors flow into one another and edges are minimized.

To the right is Jennifer Molesworth's sketch of young alders beside a trail. Here Jennifer has let brushwork tell the story of these trees and their trunks. To the left is Joan Poor's striking sumi-style painting of lupines, forest and clouds. She has captured all the drama of the brooding skies contrasting with the rich colors of conifers and lupines.

Lupines in the North Cascades

--II am writing a little bit more about the Pacific Northwest by Brush watercolor workshop I taught in June at the North Cascades Institute. Driving up on Friday we were amazed by the blooming Russell lupines beside Highway 20 just west of Newhalem. We determined to go back there on our last day, and here's my photo of this spectacular scene. I learned from a friend who was a gardener for Seattle City Light in Newhalem that one of her predecessors there got the idea for planting these lupines--now decades later I think the Park Service may regret these non-native plantings, but the lupines looked incredibly happy and somehow not at all out of place. I think there are other invasive species that are much more of a problem. In any case, they made for some wonderful paintings.
To the right is Ruth Haroldson's painting, just begun, of the lupines, done in a wet into wet style that works beautifully for this subject matter.
Here is a group of the painters, including Ruth and her daughter, Stephanie, sitting beside the Goodell Creek Campground sign.

I couldn't resist taking this photo of our graduate student assistant, Katie Tozier, all bedecked in a lupine-colored jacket, whose home town is Twain Harte, California.

Natural History: Educating the Eye

Before returning to the Pacific Northwest in this blog( I plan to write more about the last workshop for the North Cascades Institute in the coming days) I wanted to share one of my favorite exhibits from the American Museum of Natural History. The entire Museum is a feast for any eye--the sheer genius of all the exhibits, the architecture, painted mural backdrops in the dioramas, lettering and presentation, serve as a wonderful education for artists who make any sort of art, two dimensional or three. The Great Hall of African Mammals is a perfect combination of Art Deco (it opened in 1937) and Classical. Above each diorama is a frieze, then the animal is titled below in elegant Roman carved letters, and marble fronts the exhibits. Many schoolchildren were visiting the Museum the day we toured it, and I was really impressed with their excitement over the dioramas. So many museums are turning away from exhibit styles of the past to a more interactive and digital presentation, to engage and educate the young viewers (one of their main missions). But as we walked through the Creatures of Light: Bioluminescence exhibit, fun as it was (but very contemporary, with alot of digital media), I did not hear any of the oohs and aahs from kids that I heard in the great animal dioramas. Proof to me that beautiful art and design continues to move people.  One of my favorite displays is the Spectrum of Life, in the Hall of Biodiversity, a 100 foot long installation with 1500 specimens of 28 living groups, reflecting 3.5 billion years of evolution. It's impossible to photograph it, you really have to see it in person, but for me it captures some of the whimsy of the old Cabinets of Curiosities, with countless miraculous creatures all fitted into some order (unlike the Cabinets, which were just full of oddities collected for wealthy patrons). The Spectrum of Life is quite different from the great dioramas--it has an ornamental design quite appropriate to the massive number of specimens--a tapestry with hundreds of threads of life.

The Highline: Elevated Gardening

On our recent visit to New York, a relative who lives in Chelsea shared The Highline with us, a park built on an old elevated railway line.  I was so impressed with the beauty of the plantings, the way the surrounding urban landscape was incorporated into the views--in much the same way that Japanese gardens use "borrowed" scenery. Here's a photo of a mass planting of astilbe, and you can see how water runs off the channels. I spoke to a Friends of the Highline volunteer and she explained how they do as much watering through rain runoff as possible. No pesticides are used either-- she described a recent problem with scale on a group of maples and they'd brought in ladybugs to deal with it. The Highline actually employs more gardeners than Central Park, which is not surprising. Central Park is not really about flowers; Vaux and Olmsted, instead, envisioned it as a picturesque landscape that would offer grassy meadows, and distant views of trees, more of an approximation of the "wild" as it was understood in the 19th century. The Highline is more of a city promenade, and I found the plantings a delightful place to rest the eyes--in Manhattan you can be overwhelmed by the masses of people passing by on the street, and these flowers and plants give a respite from that. There were indeed masses of people strolling by, but the plants and trees gave small intimate views of something besides tall buildings and claustrophobic corridors. None of the buildings near the Highline are tall, and the breezes blow in off the River, so there is real refreshment there. I really loved the choice of plants--to the right is a smoke bush; what a great design to place it in the context of the rich brick building behind it.

To the left is a rose, mutabilis, and it's delightful how cheerfully it fits in to the brick wall, and painted white wall beside it.

There are even small trees, and this group of birches at the south end gives a small taste of a northern forest. I was really amazed at the foresight of the volunteers and New York City planners and private partners who brought this park into being. Without their vision, the old elevated rail tracks were destined to be torn down, and would probably have been replaced by skyscrapers.

Just Published by Pomegranate

Pictured here are new releases of my work from Pomegranate Communications. To the left is a boxed set of holiday cards, December Moon. For each image my subject was a notable tree or trees with snow and moon; I was inspired by a trip to Yosemite and to the Portland Japanese Garden, where I saw astonishing trees, including ancient junipers at Olmsted Point in Yosemite, giant sequoias at Mariposa Grove, red firs near Taft Point in Yosemite, and an elegant Japanese maple at the Portland Japanese Garden. To the right is the new Nature's Peace 2013 calendar, with quotations from the writings of John Muir paired with my paintings--landscapes and wildlife portraits-- all of them began with my visits to favorite wild places, including Union Bay in Seattle, North Cascades National Park, Yosemite National Park, Bandelier National Monument and Yellowstone National Park.

Central Park Rustic

On my recent visit to New York and Central Park, I was able to explore some of the northern Park, including the Ravine, the Loch, Huddlestone Arch, and Montanye's Rivulet, which flows beneath the Arch. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creators of Central Park, were deeply influenced by the Picturesque style, increasingly popular since the 18th century, which emphasized the pastoral, the rural, and the humble. Vaux and Olmsted intended the Park to create a "surrogate for rural beauty", according to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, author of Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design.  Olmsted was also enamored of the lushness of the tropics, and how it conveyed the bounty of nature, like the Hudson River painter Frederick Church, and many of the plantings in Central Park reflect that. He wrote in a letter to the Park's head gardener that he "sought the effect produced by the superabundant creative power, infinite resource, and liberality of Nature--the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of Nature." To the right is Huddlestone Arch--Vaux instructed the men building the Arch to only select boulders from within the Park. The huge rocks are held together solely by gravity and friction-- there is no mortar, nails or support beams.  Walking through this area, I heard the sound of the stream as it descended the Ravine--on a weekday there were few people around.  I could have been out on a forest walk in the countryside--I experienced everything that Vaux and Olmsted intended!

Central Park Wild

I spent the last several days in New York, and as many hours as I could wandering around Central Park. At Bank Rock Bay in the Ramble I saw this raccoon browsing in the foliage, then at the same time several turtles, including a real whopper-sized Snapping Turtle--probably around 2 feet long from head to tail. Looking over the bridge, a New Yorker near me was exclaiming that he had never seen one so huge here.

Further north in the Park in The Ravine near Harlem Meer we spotted a family of 3 Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers--they flew before I could get a photo, but a couple of New Yorkers with binoculars and cameras helped us identify them.

All over the Park we could hear the beautiful twirring call of cardinals, a bird I miss out in the Pacific Northwest, and I finally took a good picture of this male.

Here's a butterfly--I think it's a Question Mark, Polygonia interrogationis, looking a bit the worse for wear--a major chunk is missing from its left wing! It's true that much in Central Park shows the wear and tear of the millions of people who visit and the effects of the surrounding megalopolis. There's no way any of it could be called pristine, and yet, what a marvel that these species can survive and thrive here--the amazing foresight of 19th century New York City planners, the beautiful Greensward Plan of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the important work today of the Central Park Conservancy, which cares for the Park, its trees and wildlife, employing scientists to test the water, the dirt, remove invasive species and maintain this haven. It's a place of beauty and rest and it is free and open to all. This is what parks are all about, whether they exist in wilderness or urban cores.

Painters, Peaks & Forests: North Cascades Institute

On Friday's session of the Pacific Northwest by Brush workshop at the North Cascades Institute, we viewed this dramatic cloud formation swirling over the top of Pyramid Peak, a portent of the rainy weather on Saturday. Today I am featuring some of the students' work, inspired by the peaks and forests of the Learning Center.  

To the right is Roy Anderson of Walla Walla.

 

 

 

 

To the left is his wife, Joyce Anderson, with a painting of the mist enveloping the lower slopes of Sourdough Mountain.

To the right is Susan Hamilton with her painting of Pyramid Peak and surrounding ridges, with dramatic cloudy sky.




To the left is Francis Smith of San Juan Island sharing his paintings of forest and peaks.

Where Water Comes Together: North Cascades

Last weekend I taught a watercolor workshop, Pacific Northwest by Brush, for the North Cascades Institute. I was joined by a group of 16 painters, excited to learn and savor the Park environment. The weather was very unsettled, bringing us sunshine on Friday night, rain all day on Saturday, and cloudy skies on Sunday. It was an ideal way to experience North Cascades National Park: giving us a very firsthand knowledge of where our water and power comes from, and visions of lush ferns, incredible waterfalls, including Ladder Creek Falls outside of the Gorge Dam powerhouse in Newhalem. Katie Roloson, who is the Curriculum Coordinator and longtime staff member at the Institute, assisted me in the workshop. She suggested we take a short drive downriver from the Learning Center on the bus on Saturday evening--what a surprise--I had never seen it before and thought it one of the most beautiful falls I've ever seen. This is how much of the upper Skagit must have looked before the dams. We saw it in early evening light in drizzly skies that had been dark all day, and the mosses and dripping cedars and douglas firs glowed as if they were incandescent. In the center of the falls and raging creek, huge boulders were stuck between narrowing banks and the water surged wildly around them.

Here an American Dipper sits on a mossy boulder above the river. There is a Raymond Carver poem called Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.  He was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, which must have given him a very deep appreciation for water, as it sits below the Oregon Coast Range on the Columbia River where it flows out to the Pacific. I love several of the lines:

But the big streams have my heart too

And the places streams flow into rivers where they join the sea.

The places where water comes together

With other water. Those places stand out

In my mind like holy places.

White-Crowned Sparrow: And Rowed Him Softer Home

Earlier this week I walked in Magnuson Park and observed this White-Crowned Sparrow hopping along a path. It reminded me of a beautiful Emily Dickinson poem: A Bird Came Down the Walk. In the poem some lines reveal how closely she looked at natural subjects, and other lines display her untethered imagination, as free as any bird in flight. I am quoting a few selected lines here.

...He glanced with rapid eyes

That hurried all around--

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought--

He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb

And he unrolled his feathers

And rowed him softer home--

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam--

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon

Leap, plashless as they swim.