DBD World

Spillway 1, 2014, inkjet pigment print on archival paper is part of the permanent collection of the Bonneville Dam (and displayed in the Oregon Visitor's Center).

I love the way monochrome and a little desaturation reveal the movement, structure, and contours of the forces at work in these images of water meeting an equal power: in the Columbia River Gorge.  

I appreciate the x-ray translucence and approachability that can be found here in the enormous, dangerous, and inherently inhuman--even as these same shallows and depths provide inspiration, literal power, and a mystical reminder to look beyond.  Subjects like these sit at the intersection of natural resources and transcendence.  It's a place that overrides the mind and speaks directly to being.   

 I've made my home here for almost twenty years, but I come from the New York metropolitan area.  Even in the throes of development that the Portland area is experiencing today, I hope to retain the subtle perpetual and enduring sense of wonder this land inspires in me, and humility that comes along with being a immigrant in a land that has embraced me and my inner wildness.

Even when water is still it has an inevitable and magical capacity not only to move but to change state. So when we capture its movement in a still image we are magicians, we cheat mortality, we get to keep something that cannot ever be held.

Water is always a story.

I wrote those words (slightly edited to reflect the development which is now an unavoidable major plot line in the story of Portland) a couple of years ago to describe a series of fine arts photographs I called Black Meets Water.  

They still really describe my relationship to the land of the Pacific Northwest.  Before I came here, my artistic practice was entirely word-oriented (I'm also a novelist, author of non-fiction, translators, and I've done a little spoken word too and all that began at a fairly young age).

But, like water itself, I naturally change state. At different periods, and in different environments, words or pixels (or fiber) may inspire me.

When this began to happen it was a more unusual phenomenon. That was before we acknowledged that there were beings called multi-hyphenates (thanks, Hollywood) or that artistic practices that incorporated various mediums was something commonplace.

So the Pacific Northwest, and specifically the Portland area, was the environment where creatively I began to alternate the steam of writing with the water of fiber and then the ice of digital art.

It happened almost by itself, and it was a natural process. I just followed it.

For me, in the mid 1990's when I came here, Portland was about resources and freedom and the land. It's funny to me as I look at those three words, that they are clearly universal keywords of the pioneering spirit. One of my best friends here is fourth generation Oregonian, and her daughter is fifth generation, and she would probably use those same words. So what I was doing was very universal and had been done a bazillion times before in a bazillion ways. And a bazillions times since. It's just a thing people do. I personally was just doing it artistically and internally. (No wagons, no farming.)  And around here a lot of people come and go and not just today. In the 90's and into the turn of the aughts Portland was known as Mount of Olives, which meant that people came here to rest and regenerate before they went somewhere else, although the goals were a little different than they are today.  But In my case, for some reason, the place stuck.

The resources were artistically physical.  When I came here and for a long time after you could park anywhere in the industrial district and pore through sheets of stained glass, beads, wood, recycled furniture, door handles, yarn, beekeeping supplies and almost anything else you might have a whim for.  Some, although not all, of that is still close-in-available, but you sure don't have freedom of access. If you can park there easily you thank your guardian angel and you might use a traffic app to thread your way in.

Proximity and access alone encouraged me to try things I might never have otherwise. And when I did, people were always available, willing, and delighted to help. I wasn't a child. But in that way I could be a child again.  The answer to almost any question I asked, as far as art was concerned, as far as the potential of awareness was concerned, was always, yes.

And that's how the steam in me learned how and that it certainly could turn into water, and water into ice. And then back again.

I just wanted to show you the root of me doing visual art. This is it. There are people in my life, who knew me only as steam, who regularly ask me that.

BTW, the prints in this series are prints on silver paper or on silver paper and sandwiched between sheets plexiglass, which is a method that I arrived on to show the depth in the water, but also makes them sometimes look like silver jewelry.  (Something else that I owe to the state of Oregon and the city of Portland and because when I asked people answered and no one said no.)  A little later, I hope to make a few available here.

On the left, Spica in crêpe de chine in Andesite (black and white monochrome) and on the right Indigo (deep blue gray to pale gray and periwinkle monochrome) right out of the box.

Look at Andesite.  At the top left, it is very charcoal.  But at the bottom right corner, where it overlaps the Indigo version, it almost seems to take on a little blue.

And that's silk for you.  Some of that little shift relates to the almost sparkly, indefinable translucence of crepe de chine, a most delightful silk.  But the rest just has to do with the structure of silk itself.  Its fiber structure is triangular and therefore prismatic.  That means it is always going to pick up just a little bit of the colors around it, which is great for blending with you and the rest of your wardrobe.

Here they are side by side without any overlap, folded, and very slightly separated at a more saturated point in the image:

Your monitor may display the image color slightly differently than mine, but you can see that the color difference here is quite clear.  Which just provides another way you can play with silk!

Shop SPICA - Photographic Print Silk Scarf

MATERIAL OPTIONS
SILK GEORGETTE: lightweight, matte, filmy, and semi-transparent.  Romantic and dramatic.  Brilliant in warmer weather and a great layering piece year round.

12 MM CREPE DE CHINE: slightly heavier and translucent with beautiful drape, depth, and subtle shine. Great year round.

COLORS
ANDESITE MONOCHROME: a subtle, sparkly palette of blacks, grays, and whites.

INDIGO MONOCHROME: just as graduated but slightly bluer and cooler, moving from deep, saturated indigo gray to pale blue gray with a touch of lavender and white.

I wanted to show you this image on the page about me where I mention the hydrangea. But it looks better here.

According to Wikipedia, "A panicle is a much-branched inflorescence.^[1] Some authors distinguish it from a compound spike, by requiring that the flowers (and fruit) be pedicellate. The branches of a panicle are often racemes. A panicle may have determinate or indeterminate growth.

Once in a while someone asks me what a panicle is.  People like me who grow flowers often end up just flinging such words around.  It kind of goes with the territory.  So now you know too.

This hydrangea happens to be called Oak Leaf. If you don't happen to know it, its oak shaped leaves turn deep red in the autumn, along with its white flowers. Although the flowers turn more of an old fashioned russet-rose.

About forty five minute’s drive into the Columbia River Gorge, one of the Bonneville Dam’s original, WPA-era turbines rises into the sky above a long green lawn above the river.

I began photographing the Bonneville Dam about five years ago when I happened to drive by just before sunset to discover a full moon rising above it. 

I had arrived there quite unexpectedly. Until then, I had been shooting almost exclusively in the soft natural light studio that my east-facing dining room makes very early every morning for maybe a couple of weeks on either side of each equinox. It is during that specific curve of the physical year that the sun rises firmly, softly, (and at the sort extraordinary angle you can perhaps only enjoy above the 45th parallel) around and behind a silhouetted Mount Hood and into that room.

I would wake up before dawn and abstract the sunrise over the mountain.  Then, I would often use the light inside the room to do other work until about 7:30.

I had been waiting for that exact week in October to resume what I had left off doing in late March and I had already begun to shoot. Friends and people who worked with me would come and look at what I was doing, and then I would do some more. I had no plans or goals, it was simply a protected and beautiful era of creative discovery that was already well in progress and could only be explored within a very specific window.

That is, until a pipe dramatically burst in the 1920s house, requiring a full repiping.

Suddenly, there were lots of important decisions to be made, and a slew of workers in the house very early in the morning, making it basically impossible to shoot. And that was aside from the part where there wasn’t going to be any water.

There was no question that I had to go for at least a few days and quickly.

So I decided to hunker down in the Gorge for a few nights at a place that a friend had recently mentioned in passing.  It happened to be located quite close to the Bonneville Dam.

In retrospect, my choice was kind of a joke, since this was not only a location which brought a whole new meaning to the experience of enjoying running water (sic), but there was certainly no chance there would be any shortage of it whatsoever.

Driving back to my hotel on the second night or so, I caught the moonrise, followed it off the main highway and down the service road, and followed its arc above this singular crossroad of power until it was too dark to stay. 

And so there I was: outside, functionally alone, and on the edge of a huge river.  In more or less exactly the same spot where the rising sun came to me as I photographed Mount Hood at sunrise and facing where I stood now from a single, protected, and very private room in my home.

Meanwhile, along the riverbank below, many men in plastic folding garden chairs and flanked by blue coolers silently fished Chinook. 

Since then I have been back often.  

Originally, I was looking for a single shot of this turbine to add to another series. But its curves and planes began to carve out a study on spiraling, textures, mass, scale: and also of how the curves of industry can carve out and clarify the possibilities of flow in positive and negative space and not only water.

Just to be clear, I don’t think a turbine has a gender.  It’s just that the blades and body displayed decidedly feminine qualities in abstraction. In them, you can also begin to decode a geometry and lexicon of creative power--the precise engineering angles and undulations that spin water through the turbine shaft that spins energy around and through copper and magnets to generate pure electricity.

An historic image courtesy of the Bonneville Power Authority (Creative Commons license).

Because of this, and also because this is one of a group of turbines that powered so much of the Western United States so continuously for so long (see photo above), I decided to call it “sister.”     

Available as individual prints, this series also displays nicely as a grouping  of 10” x 14” or larger images to maximize the play of natural and industrial movement; of positive and negative space.

Unspun but not unsung: bottom, raw (tussah) silk top.  Above, silk blended with yak. Right:  Thrust.  I spun these two silk fibers to create prototype drawstrings for the protective bags that DBD pieces come inside.

I got to know silk when I learned how to spin it.

And I learned how to spin very soon after I learned how to knit because I had figured out that if I really wanted to have control over my own projects, I couldn't depend 100% on someone else's yarn. (Even though commercial and artisanal yarn are very, very nice.)

As soon as I began to take lessons, I found out what every spinner already knows: hands, not yarn, are really what spinning is all about. Hands are smart and they get to know the quality any textile fiber or variation much better than your mind ever will or could.  And while yarn is beautiful, and knitted garments even more so, it is the feeling of fiber in the hands, and the rhythm of the wheel that keeps spinners hoped.

Not soon after I went for the silk.

Silk is known as a more challenging spinning fiber. It's fast and it's slippery. It can cut your hands. While wool and many goat fibers are elastic, lofty, buttery, and forgiving  (you can break off many like cotton candy and then just pick them up and spin another poof on, so if your fiber gets away from you you can almost always get it back) silk is not quite as obliging. Getting it going can be more like lighting a match in the wind. And as unseen top or roving goes, it's fairly pricey.

But it's strong as all get out. Spinners are forever breaking a length of plied or single yarn from our bobbins because we need a little piece.  Forget the scissors.  They're such bad form!  (Kind of like using an umbrella in Portland.)

But even a fine single of well-spun silk will hurt your hand for a while before you finally give up on that breaking-it-off idea and discreetly capitulate to your scissor.

Silk is light, light, light.  And it's warm, warm, warm. In the summer. it's cool, cool, cool. It also plays well with others.  Add a little silk yarn to a cuff, or card a little top into a wool or mohair, or even ply one silk single with one  wool single and you likely have magic.   Given its light weight, that strength, the luster it can subtly provide, it's an ally you don't really want to go without.

Not to mention the way it subtly but distinctly reflects light and in so doing can also pick up and blend in the colors surrounding it. That's because it's fiber structure is triangular and prismatic, so it picks up colors from its environment.

And as it happened, I loved to spin it.  

"Strong, small hands," my teacher remarked.

Spinning silk feels like just moving energy.  It doesn't have much drag or puff.  It just moves.

And that's what it does in fine woven silks like the ones we use for DBD pieces, too. 

Our pieces are made in silk georgette, 12 mm crêpe de chine, silk twill, and silk charmeuse.

We choose silks according to the season and also match them to the image to render the finest product we can create.  Some pieces look best magical and filmy and sparkly in silk georgette.  Others are also spectacular afforded the depth and the different very slight surface textures and sheens offered by crêpe de chine or silk twill.  Occasionally, only the drape, creamy shine, and tonal range of silk charmeuse will do.

Which one will you choose?

That's up to you.

Travel well, you two.

"Do you travel a lot?" asked the woman who came up to me while I stood at the edge of the display table at a trunk show in Portland.  

"Well yeah," I said after a second, smiling. Because until that moment she had been a complete stranger, but now, poof, like that, she knew me. "I did for years. And a thin, light weight shawl always came along."

In those years, my favorite was a black rectangle trimmed with soft, tiny pom-poms on either end. It went with me from the States, to various locations in Spain, Austria, probably to Russia, Amsterdam, and to Spain a couple more times until it was finally lost forever in an overhead bin on a flight from Paris to Barcelona en route home.

How did that happen? How, after all those years, did it vanish? As well we might ask at the ends of relationships of all kinds. Sometimes, they just slip silently away, courtesy of some meek and unassuming loophole or other expertly buried in the endless fabric of space-time.

In this particular case, I had let a stranger very kindly lift my things out of that overhead bin for me. I didn't double-check the bin afterward for items that might have, as they say, settled in flight. Because, really, that would have been a rude way to acknowledge that man's deliberate and efficient kindness.

Which was in direct contrast to the actions of the gentleman friend who had just dropped me off at the airport in Paris after assuring me he would make sure I was at the exact gate before he ever took his eyes off of me. But, instead, had actually somehow let me out at the curb at the wrong terminal entirely.  

I missed my original flight, at which point it became incumbent upon me not only to trot myself and my bags to an entirely different and decidedly non-contiguous terminal, but also to book an entirely fresh ticket on the spot.

So I was also perhaps a bit distracted at the time.

And so it was that the beloved black shawl that had accompanied me for years vanished from my life.

I called the airline lost and found maybe four or five times. It was one of those lost and founds where you just leave a message as instructed by an echoing recording. And where that strange echo very pointedly and efficiently lets you know your message is being left in some recondite tiled chamber behind some obscure stairwell in the bowels of an airport where metal shelves are chock full of necessary or precious items for which no one is actually still searching. Then there is nothing to do but wait. To see. If anyone ever returns your call.

You might say I've been waiting a few years now.

But once in a while I still reach for that shawl.  

I never told my gentleman friend that he had left me at the wrong terminal entirely. This was, not surprisingly, a harbinger that this nascent connection of ours was not long for this world.

But never mind that.

Oh, the places that black wrap took me. Or I took it.  

I can't even begin to tell you.  

If you travel, want to take a wrap along?

And likewise if you just take a wrap--anywhere you go, are already traveling.

So I loved it that my new customer picked up one of my pieces and that it told her the real story of my traveling. That story being---always take a wrap that loves you along.

May you be always be well covered when you travel. And may you always be well-covered whether your travels take you to the grocery store, or the shores of Mauritius (where I have never been), or to the entrance of a Tuscan castle turned vineyard on the edge of an unexpected thunderstorm in May. Where you suddenly come upon identical four vintage Alpha Romeos in jellybean colors lined up neatly before a stand of arborvitae in the dusty, empty parking lot.

As you regard their spectacular and intentional symmetry, heat lightning begins to flash off in the distance. It is maybe twenty minutes after high noon.

"It can't possibly rain," says your companion, who is local, and older and distinguished and humble and has lived there all his life. You've just met him.  He's being kind of polite, showing you around.

"But it's going to," you say.

And it does. But who cares. It's gorgeous and strange. And by then you are eating fried squash blossoms, barely six inches from all that thunderous excitement, under an awning somewhere in town.

And there I have been. In that castle parking lot. And six inches from that lightning storm. With a light, strong, large wrap in my bag.

May you always be well covered when you travel. And if it's with a DBD piece -- well then, that's very nice.

Once upon a time a long, long time ago when I was getting married (and just for clarity's sake I’m not any more, and that’s ok) I rebelled over the veil thing.  In those days I had a hip and cynical angel sitting on one shoulder and a total romantic on the other. And since I came in this sort of inevitable fairy tale physical package that went really well with the romantic putti, I occasionally mind-boggled the odd new acquaintance who happened to be around while my hip and cynical angel and I were holding forth.

What's a bride to do? I handled this spicy juxtaposition by choosing this great dressmaker in the West Village who made me something really simple and elegant but also floaty in ecru silk chiffon.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I continued to kvetch to my mother about the whole veil thing.  Because I still firmly believed, and this belief was based on empirical evidence mind you, that if you didn't watch out a wedding dress gave you just enough silk chiffon to hang yourself.

“Oh no no no, “ she said.  “You want a veil. Every woman ought to wear a veil at least once. They are incredibly flattering.  They are soft and reflect light all over.  When else are you going to get the chance?”

As you might imagine, this little insight overrode any objection that still simmered inside of me in that beautiful and cynical era.

And of course she was right.

I believe I still have that veil somewhere. Unless someone stole it out of my storage closet. And when it comes to veils, anything is possible. They are hot and sacred items.

You know where I’m going with this. Right?

A monochrome silk scarf or wrap with a lot of white or light in it is for all intents and purposes the everyday equivalent of a veil. You don’t have to get married to wield this particular magic. It follows that the DBD Monochrome Collection is also a fleet of "stealth-veils".

The structure of silk fiber is triangular (prismatic).  Practically, that means it blends with other colors and lights around it while retaining its own characteristics. Those colors and lights include whatever else you are wearing and also your face and the rest of you.

None of our are pure optical white in nature (which can be slightly harsh on some skin tones). Right now, as I write, I am looking at a long remnant of silk crepe de chine draped over the back of a rocking chair, and it is slightly ecru (warm) and also has subtly warmer and cooler bits depending on how the sun is hitting it indirectly right now through a tall leaded glass window at midday.

 Nearby, Thrust in silk twill is a very slightly cool white at the border with both slightly cool and warm grays from pale to deep charcoal in the image itself.  And the diagonal weave of the twill gives its shine an additional, subtle light that make the palest grays seem to glow from within.

Anywhere near your face these pieces flatter.  And because they are printed individually, color can and occasionally does occasionally very slightly. These very slight variations are a beautiful facet of the artisanal/digital printing process.  We capitalize on this phenomenon (which is just a result of fine arts photography and the different weather and lighting conditions at the moment each image was captured) to give you options if you want them.

Andesite monochrome is a fairly neutral monochrome including an occasional subtle warm or cool tone  (think very very subtle sepia, or a shadow at twilight, respectively).

Indigo monochrome tilts slightly towards the blue, in range going from a very, very deep charcoal indigo on one end of the continuum to a pale periwinkle gray on the other. 

Nettle leaf monochrome (check) has a slight, warm greenish cast, as if the black and white print had been born in a field of herbs.

Again, these subtle monochrome color variations are distilled and enhanced from the original photographic image itself as it prints, depending on the subject and the time and day on which they were captured. They were not pre-determined and then manufactured.

That's fun, but what it means for you is that you can, if you would like to, choose a piece based on your skin tone.

I am fair to light with both pink and yellow tones in my skin, very light eyes, and hair that is currently medium brown with silver, platinum and copper highlights.  (Yes, really.)  

I can and do wear all three current variations gladly.

But a silk-loving customer who is fair, chocolate-haired and brown-eyed loves the indigo monochrome.  In fact, it was developed at her request from a sample that came back a little blue.

Meanwhile, a fair blue-eyed blonde who tans golden loves Asterism in filmy, chalky, matte silk georgette in the Andesite version with all its variations of ecru and gray.

Our models have very different skin tones.  So check out their images too.

In About Deborah I talked about a group of people working hard to do something beautiful together on an island.  Here's what that looks like after it's done.

Also, I like pink.

That's all.