Molly Hashimoto

Print Harvest: North Cascades Institute Workshop

Today I'm continuing to write about the marvelous energy of the folks in the printmaking workshop I taught last weekend at the North Cascades Institute. To the left you can see our classroom counter filling up with everyone's efforts.  Van Gogh wrote in a letter:   The act of printing has always seemed to me a miracle, just such a miracle as the growing up of a tiny seed of grain to an ear--an everyday miracle, even the greater because it happens everyday. One drawing is sown on the stone or the etching plate, and a harvest is reaped from it.

One of the participants, Bernice Harris, sent me this photo of our classroom, everyone deeply engaged in their work. 

 

Printmaking in the North Cascades

Last weekend I taught printmaking techniques to a group of talented students at the North Cascades Institute's Environmental Learning Center. The burst of creative energy I witnessed reminded me of these Pacific Dogwood flowers  emerging from cold winter to glorious spring, seen near Sourdough Creek.
The photo to the right shows the complete concentration of some of the students, designing, carving and printing. The wonderful thing about art is that the focus is not tiresome, but instead becomes more of an immersion in the moment--many students confided that they had completely lost all sense of time passing as they worked.  In coming days I will post the art they created.

Print Experiment: North Cascades in August

I've been experimenting with Japanese woodblock printing, moku hanga, using rice paste and colors mixed from gouache and watercolor, and I tried out some papers from McClain's Printmaking in Portland. The image to the left was printed on masa dosa, a well-sized and heavyweight handmade Japanese paper. I thought the white hue would be good for showing the amazing color of Diablo Lake in August.
To the right is the same image printed on kozo paper, much lighter weight, creamier in hue and more transparent. In brushing the color on I discovered that more paint and rice paste was neccessary on the masa dosa paper.

Travel Journal: Student Gallery

Today I continue my posting of student art from the Travel Journal workshop that I taught on Sunday at Daniel Smith. Subjects ranged from New Mexico to Venezuela to European rivers.

Daniel Smith Workshop: Travel Journal Gallery

On Sunday, I taught another travel journal workshop at Daniel Smith in Seattle and today I'm featuring participants' work.  We explored different sketching media and also examined ways to use watercolor to express different subjects. What made the workshop especially fun was that each participant brought their own favorite travel photos-- I got to see places they'd been, and their own reactions to those places. 

Children, Nature and Art

Yesterday I spent the morning at Thorndyke Elementary School in Tukwila, sharing birds' nests, eggs, trillium and the pleasures of sketching and painting all those spring wonders with a group of very appreciative and engaged children. I work with all ages, and I've found that no matter the age or experience, when you present something fascinating--like most of the things we encounter in the natural world--participants almost always want to draw and paint--uncertainty, hesitation--those feelings vanish.  As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty brings copies of itself into being...What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a...flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.  Wittgensten says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.

Many thanks to King County Library for funding, Gaye Hinchliff, King County librarian, and Mary Djaboury, Thorndyke Elementary libariran, for arranging the visit and giving me assistance throughout!

Washington Wildflowers in Spring

On Saturday I traveled to the Darrington and Granite Falls libraries with watercolor supplies and a basket of spring blooming Washington perennials, including the trillium and bleeding heart pictured to the left, lovely sketches done by one of the participants at the Granite Falls Library.

To the right are some of the participants at Granite Falls. It was really fun sharing these native beauties with the people who live beside all these wonders: some of the patrons at Darrington told me they had trillium blooming in their back yards! 

Shooting Star: Native Wildflower

I chose this native Shooting Star, Dodecatheon hendersonii, to draw and paint in a style reminiscent of the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who created a series of botanical studies that my students and I have loved for years. Here he writes of nature, landscape, trees and flowers:

In nature you may go mad over some great landscape but nevertheless every tree--aye every leaf--every blade of grass and even every wee modest crimson tipped flower demands and I hope receives its share of admiration.

Birds' Nests: Chickadee, Hummingbird & Robin

I borrowed these nests from Seattle Audubon on Friday, in preparation for the series of library programs I'll be offering for King County Library this spring on spring nature journals--I happily spent part of Easter Sunday painting them. I imagined the robin's eggs in the nest, guessing that the bright colors would make all the nests look better. The robin uses mud to fashion the cup shape, and weaves sticks and grasses into it, as well as moss, taking care to line the nest with it. The chickadee nest is very soft with moss as its major ingredient.  The hummingbird nest is a miracle of disguise, placed in the intersection between three branches, and  hidden by lacy lichens secured to the nest by the hummingbird's sticky saliva. The inside of the nest, about 1- 1/2 nches in diameter,  is made of soft fibers--perhaps it is dog or cat hair? Last summer I saw an Anna's Hummingbird flying in and out of our apple tree for days on end--I knew there must be a nest, but I couldn't see anything, just branches--and I wondered how it could possibly just disappear into a branch!  Now I understand!  I checked out a couple of books from Audubon as well, and there is a wonderful book, still available from used booksellers,  Secrets of the Nest, by Joan Dunning. It is natural history at its best--storytelling with a narrative drive that makes it impossible to put down! And it is beautifully illustrated with Dunning's drawings and watercolors.

A Clutch of Eggs: Spring Wonders

In preparation for a series of spring nature journal workshops I will be teaching for King County Library, I went online in search of birds' eggs and found Bone Clones, a company that specializes in skulls, skeletons and anatomical models for scientific and educational use. They offer a complete set of American bird eggs, but also individual models including the Northwest species I sketched here in watercolor.  From lower left clockwise these are the species: Scrub Jay (an unusual Seattle visitor which I saw last winter at Union Bay Natural Area-- I couldn't resist the beautiful speckled egg!), Great Blue Heron, American Kestrel, Marbled Murrelet and Robin.