With thanks for hollyhocks in fall

For good friends and family,

the inspiration of art and music,

and the grace of God.

For the small moments and big.

For all that we are blessed with.

For challenges which keep us moving forward.

Rally to Restore Sanity--Seattle

(Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion/arttrek.com, 10-30-10, "Laugh More")

I met up with excellent editor and beautiful friend Sherri Schultz at the Rally to Restore Sanity in Seattle. When we got to Westlake the plaza was filled (more than 6,000 by the rally organizers count) and the mood was high. We laughed while standing for sanity and articulate and thoughtful debate. When the rally broke up at noon as the rain poured down, the "protesters" scattered and one lone sign remained leaning against a retail shop, a lost balloon bobbed nearby. The sign called out "Laugh More" and the yellow balloon's message, "Enough," fell with a whisper to cold blue pavement.

Lots of other signs made me laugh that day like "Hitler is Hitler" but "Laugh More" pretty much sums it up.

Loving Mr. Picasso

Visited the Picasso exhibit at SAM this weekend. I joined my friend's Don and Brenda Gray, up from Oregon.

I wasn't prepared to be struck so deeply by the power of his work. Never a fan or follower of the great Spaniard, I became one that day. I feel every artist must see this work, which is a collection of his own making. The quantity and collection stimulated dreams and new visions. Stumbling out the museum door at dusk I felt unwilling to look at anything for a time.

This exhibit is from the museum of his work in Paris. Above is a drawing from the room of sculpture. The day I visited a group of American girls were exploring the artist's work through drawing it. My drawing reflects one of those moments. The great monstrous women's heads were poised to devour us, at least so it seemed.

Asian Guys' Hair

From "Asian Guys' Hair" by photographer Ann-Marie Stillion -- a series of images shot in impromptu street studios in Seattle's Chinatown in 2006-07.

Hard to imagine a month has gone by since I posted here - whoops! Playing catch-up since hanging the show at Habitude. Have been working on building out my website with some of my earlier projects. Am trying for an overview rather than just being current. In the newest version of arttrek.com I including the series, "Asian Guys' Hair," and am thinking of going back to Chinatown for another day or two, setting up the street studio. Looking at these images today proved inspiring. If you are interested in being a subject, send an email.

Shooting for a world record in Sammamish!

(Photo above by Anne Lindsay) On Saturday, July 17, 2010, the first annual "Largest gathering of people with natural red hair" will happen in Sammamish, Washington at the Skyline High School Stadium (1122 228th Avenue Southeast, Sammamish, Washington) - right across the street from Sammamish City Hall.

A fine artist, portrait photographer and chronicler of redheads, Anne Lindsay has decided to go for the title of largest gathering of redheads for the Guinness Book of World Records.

I am one of the lucky photographers to join her team for this event. And today Anne told me it's not too late to sign up and be in the shot if you're a natural redhead: just come early and get in line. Gates open at 2 p.m. and the record winning shot is scheduled for 3 p.m. Or if you're not a redhead and want to cheer on the wild ginger madness there is a $5 admission fee. Be there or be square.--ams

Happy Birthday Mr. Van Gogh

The image above was taken of Vincent Van Gogh when he was 13. Today is his birthday and he was born in 1853. The image itself is from the wikimedia commons, it is in the public domain by U.S. copyright laws.

Below is a short story originally copyrighted, Ann-Marie Stillion, 2004 and later revised as late as 2010. It is a story of my personal relationship to Van Gogh. I often think of him and was reminded the year I wrote this that he foresaw his own celebrity in his writings, that he would be famous and successful long after his death. In 2004 there was a big exhibit of his work at the Seattle Art Museum and his images hung from light poles all over town. Of course, his work can be found throughout the world now. From notebooks to the face of credit cards.

Today, I went looking for an image of him and found this photograph on wikipedia. So much is visible in his young face and so much is different from his own, more mature paintings of himself.


Here is my story of the artist.


The man who wanted to be everywhere
--for Mr. Van Gogh


One day he was allowed outside the asylum. The long cool autumn afternoons in the olive groves added to his gathering madness. He watched intensely as the gray sand swirled into wild waves under his feet like a river escaping its bed. His thoughts began to appear as a vehicle of travel.

Horizons of gold kept him awake, even as the desire for sleep crushed every thought. What appeared erratic to the friends and the medical assistants sent to save him was the effect of the effort it took to align his imagination. He had decided to thrust himself into time.

He knew he must first witness the death of all his cellular life might offer. This almost kept him from his task.

The warmth of another’s touch and that of his own body sliced away for an eternity—this would go first he knew. He stood at the doorway of his dreams without entering and practiced silence.

Eternity had called to him since he first stared up into the alcove of the church in his childhood. Curves of light, glass, incense and the frozen tears of captive saints spoke to him alone he recalled thinking. He marveled at how color and prayer bound him to heaven with so little effort on his part.

His first steps had naturally been religious. But speaking over the heads of sinners deepened his sorrow until it bent in two completely perfect spheres of light. Then he began to paint.

Existing forever is what he meant to do from the first. He painted himself into time for no other reason than he wanted to see what tied each life to the earth. From that long distance it might make sense he told himself.

Now night throws itself over a dark street in Paris and the lovers will never kiss. Strangers glide the uneven cobblestone and never stumble, nor will they meet.  The cobalt black cape of flickering starlight melts into the alchemy of fate and fortune. Someone is coming now and someone will soon leave.

by Ann-Marie Stillion, 5.31.04, revised 8.16.04, 1.26.10. All rights reserved.

For inquiries regarding republishing, please contact the writer annmarie@arttrek.com.

Beautiful Sue

I met Sue Doupe over a year ago. Full of energy and a great photographer with an established photography business in family portraits and headshots for actors & business in Seattle, her beauty inspires great photography. Also a skilled actor who has taught and performed, her natural sense of drama comes out in front of the camera as well as behind it.

Of late, Sue and Lisa Ahlberg and I started getting go together for fun with our cameras for a few hours a week somewhere in the Seattle. Business, children and jobs mean we can not do it for long but actually good things don't have to last long to be meaningful.

I took this picture with the Mamiya 330s I got from another photographer, Neil Lukas. It feels both heavy and light, complex and simple. Somehow I am so comfortable and excited about it in ways that the digital doesn't always provide for me these days. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily use the flash for now so I am concentrating on natural light.

I am planning on using the medium format almost exclusively for an upcoming project, facelessness, which will talk about displaced American tech workers and their foreign counterparts caught up in the current global struggle for jobs. Not an easy subject but an important human one which impacts so many aspects of life now: can we live globally and locally? Can we leave these most personal decisions to the massive impersonal corporate decision makers who often choose profit over balanced living? Can the marketplace really work for individuals to help us mind the heart and soul we need to survive once the bills are paid?

Maybelle Barnett 1899-2009

took the pictures above in 2004 when my Auntie Maybelle was 103. We had spent the day out shopping and going to lunch at her favorite diner. There was nothing about her that wasn't engaging and clear. She didn't really want her picture taken but I bugged her and I am glad now. She lived in her own house in Hawaii which she helped build in her eighties until she died this year shortly before her 109th birthday.

Smart and full of laughter, ready to fight to the last, auntie's long life was amazing and simple. The picture of the trees is of the small cemetery next door. She imagined that she and her fourth husband Archie might commune someday there once she had passed on. Below is a story taken from some of our talks together. All the facts are true but of course it is a story in the end.

(Update: one of my aunts noted that she thought that my dates are wrong in this story from my dear auntie. Well, all I can say is that Auntie Maybelle told me that she was born in 1899, which would make her almost 110, not 109 years old when she left us. I can only imagine how one's true age might get jumbled after so many years on earth.

8.10.10 Mystery solved. Today I found my aunt's birth certificate. She was born Oct. 22, 1900. I can only imagine that her soul connection must have been in the 19th century somehow. Her stories from relatives who experienced the civil war seemed like yesterday to her.)

Morning at 103 by Ann-Marie Stillion, 5.11.2004


Wherever she looks there is the past.


Thirty thousand nine hundred and ten mornings have come and gone. Four husbands. Dozens of cats. Thousands of birds. Only two dogs.


She says that she has only loved one person. She says it was because one person really loved her. It has been almost one hundred years since then.


Every Friday she walked to her Grandma Haynes’ house with her little dog. Two miles.


They walked straight through the quiet, dusty streets of New Haven and on to her grandmother’s grey clapboard farmhouse by the still yellow fields. Cora was that one person who really loved her, she says now. She could see her from the road. Her white dress glowed from the dark, shiny doorway. Holding a solitary rose in between two fingers, her grandmother waved her long arms and shouted.


No matter that 70,000 hours have passed since then. Now a very old woman, she traces her hand along an imaginary road on the kitchen table, millions of heartbeats later.


She has always been slender--shapely but slender. It was never apparent how much she loved sweets. And kisses. There had been thousands of kisses. No one counted those though. It isn’t right, she said.


During three centuries, she has opened and closed her pale blue eyes. Seven million fine blond strands have fallen. Millions and millions of soft champagne strands left in Phoenix and the Panama Canal and later Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of thousands of grey hairs have disappeared in the light, in the rug, in the desert, in the sand. And finally countless white curls.


What was left? One sister sculptured the leavings from her haircuts and twisted the strands into flowers and curls, which she kept in a glass box. Stiff red hair are all that remain of the mother, sister, daughter, wife. Another relative, she says, married only one man. He drank too much, beat his children. But that woman was sturdy and raised seven boys mostly alone.


She had walked into the twentieth century and on into the next without the ponies by the stream or the children tumbling in the dust. She was where she’d hoped she’d be and being there made her forget so that each morning she could remember that one person.

Merry Christmas from Seattle

The carousel is a fixture in Westlake Plaza in downtown Seattle. Sweet memories of photographing children and families with Lisa Ahlberg, watching them rushing to get their photos completed at Nordstrom. Cold and crisp. Wishing everybody infinite peace and joy. Get ready to blast off in the new decade.--ams

Photo Center NW Holiday event

Come and join us for the PCNW Holiday Portrait Shoot!
(photo left by Christopher Bachmann)

Sign up to get your portrait done and help the Photo Center raise money here

Sign up to volunteer here here


Everyone needs a great holiday photo and this year the Photo Center is the place to get them! We are hosting our first ever Holiday Portrait Shoot December 11-12, 2009 and need volunteers from our wonderful photo community to help make it happen.

The portrait event will coincide with a holiday celebration at the Photo Center featuring the PCNW Member's Juried Exhibition opening on Friday, December 11th and our annual affordable art print sale. It is bound to be an exciting weekend, so invite your family and friends to join the fun!

Teams of photographers and volunteers are assembling now!
Will you join us by being part of three teams of photographers and assistants who will design sets, gather props and take portraits?


However you want to help - we want you to be part of this fun collaborative photo shoot! You can contact me directly at annmarie@arttrek.com or visit the Photo Center NW web site at www.pcnw.org. Or use the handy sign-up forms above. Whether you want to volunteer or get a beautiful portrait see you there!

Eva's fashion statement

This is Eva's Filipino outfit as she calls it. It was in the front window of the dress shop when she first saw it. I have given up trying to find her a home and must trust that she is fine where she is. Every solution or offering is met with some kind of resistance. Thirty years on the street have molded her to a fierce defiance of everyone, and I respect that. I am trying now to document all of her outfits. She complains a bit now but so far shows up in one of fifty she says she has.

Never lonesome or without a place to go she forces me to stop worrying over her welfare as I sense that is what she wants. She intends to outlive all of us. When she resists my latest idea of photographing her fashion statements, I push back. What is her real life after all? Picking up the out of date dim sum in Chinatown or conjuring up new ways to wear her hair. I say it is both.

The video I shot of her last spring is set to open at 4Culture in downtown Seattle in February. I am looking for a place to hang a selection of stills that I have of her now.

An infinite tiger--photo collage, photography and music

Join us for a spectacular evening of art, music and great fun! The Press Gallery really knows how to do an art reception. The address is 406 Occidental Ave. South, Seattle. Call 206-382-7775 for info.

Beautiful women

sheen is a group of women over 50 who are pursuing, on their own, dreams of modeling. Mostly they intend to help non-profits raise money or raise awareness that women of any age can be glamorous. I photographed them, joined by my friend Lisa Ahlberg who functioned as an assistant and art director that day. It struck me as I refined the images from the shoot at The Ruins and made final selections how easily we dismiss each other, how we stop looking and feeling at some point, about one another. sheen is fighting stereotypes and being beautiful all at once.

Here's to you sheen. I hope you go one being marvelous, for yourselves and the whole world.

Keep showing up

This is very moving. Hey everybody. And note to all my friends. Before we have another conversation, you must watch this video from a talk Elizabeth Gilbert did at TED. If you are struggling with the life of a creative maker, or even if you are not. Or would enjoy another way to look at what we have come to call genius or inspiration. Thanks Elizabeth.

Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama, OOOOO

I can't stop crying, with joy. It's a new day.

Obama's brilliant mind and deep love is shining on every street in America.

Eva's story

I met up with Eva last week again, this time at the food bank in Wallingford in Seattle. She spent the afternoon talking with Derry from one of the agencies in the area, telling her stories of living on the street most of the last 30 years. Here are some images from that day.

At Dick's on Broadway in Seattle

Where are we in time? Actually is is 6:15 p.m. in October, 2008 but this image feels like 1950--Ann-Marie

Kenge Kenge: Obama For Change

"American people, citizens of the world. Here are songs and memories from Africa, drumming support for Barack Obama."

Artist and musicians around the world calling for change, singing for Obama.

Beautiful.

Something's happening here

Wading through the first real puddles of the season in downtown Seattle rush hour I found these girls who were only too happy to play in the viewfinder for awhile. Inspired by Neil Lukas at PCNW, I was delirious with pixels and light magic.

Peace is the way

My friend Kate in Arizona is part of a small Quaker community in Flagstaff. They asked me to design a new sign for their meeting house based on the words of the peace activist A.J. Muste.