Roots: Centrum Artist Residency, Part 1

I begin with pencil and paper. Simple. Meditative, airy gestures make marks and smudges. Alternating light and heavy pressure. My eyes try to study forms and shadow. Squinting and relaxing my gaze. Playing with seeing and not seeing.

Drawing involves continuous choosing, extracting and generalizing, while trying to dance across the paper.

The inspirations are coming from walking in a very small fraction of the vast temperate rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. I'm choosing to notice the stability of old growth spruce and cedar in Quinault, the twisted movement captured inside roots, bark, veins, and eroded paths along the Sol Duc. Man-made entanglements formed into artificial log jams fortify the banks of the Hoh. Artistic partner and spouse, Paul Godwin and I are on a trek, each day taking a bike ride into the bracing wind, and or a hike as light fog settles between the trees. We spend a night in a lodge next to a very still lake. My bathing suit fills with fine sand particles that stream out in the shower as black rivers. Thick, moist salmon for dinner. The next night we camp, after a hot springs soak and cold swim. Sunset at Lake Crescent, grilling peppers and onion for pasta.

We arrive under a grey sky at Fort Worden, Port Townsend for a two-week stint as Centrum Artists-in-Residence, and locate our small house and enormous studio. I settle in with my pencils, pads, and camera bag under the high gloomy windows, the room lined with stubborn drawers filled student art supplies. Unexpected lightning and thunder come the next day, and rain leaks through the late nineteenth century ceiling. I continue drawing as the water splatters into plastic buckets. Although the leaks are not really threatening, the staff kindly offer me an alternate studio in a historic, renovated office and gallery complex. I set up at an easel in the expansive space. The original wood-faced walls have a welcoming, worn character.

That night, I dream about breaking a vow of silence. After I carelessly shatter a champagne glass, I stare helplessly at the shards on the floor. I wake up thinking about the protection of the enshrouded forest.

I start reading Ben Goldfarb's “Eager,” a book about beavers and their ingenious engineering, their transformation of fast-flowing rivers into slow fertile marsh and spreading rivulets and construction of impenetrable lodges from slim trees. I meditate about building fortified spaces. Beaver lodges as sculptures. Self-protecting architecture, vulnerable bodies. These themes and impressions guide my choices and move my pencil lines in and around entangled trees, sticks, brush and mud, and our time in the forest.

Part 2 to follow.

Posted by:

Ameera Godwin, September 2023

Myrtle Tree Arts

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