Kathryn Cramer

I spent much of the past year rising with the sun in order to take its picture reflected on Lake Champlain, a form of sun salutation I suppose.

Beginning in about January, I undertook a journey of personal and professional transformation through the expressive arts. I wrote a lot: fiction and autobiography. I painted, mostly in a meditative way, as thought process. With director Edward Cornell, I explored drama and performance, and how that can transform both my writing and how that writing reaches an audience. And I took thousands and thousands of digital photographs, learning to cha...

I spent much of the past year rising with the sun in order to take its picture reflected on Lake Champlain, a form of sun salutation I suppose.

Beginning in about January, I undertook a journey of personal and professional transformation through the expressive arts. I wrote a lot: fiction and autobiography. I painted, mostly in a meditative way, as thought process. With director Edward Cornell, I explored drama and performance, and how that can transform both my writing and how that writing reaches an audience. And I took thousands and thousands of digital photographs, learning to change how I see and developing a new grammar for my point of view.

Had I more space, I might have included scenes of the flooding here in the spring and summer and the damage caused by Hurricane Irene, and the beauty of this special place that we inhabit.

But when I spread this years’ work out in front of me, the patterns that emerged that I found most surprising concerned the richness of the cultural and intellectual life of the Westport area and its complex relations with authority and the State. The cliché is that we come out here and escape the pressures of Civilization, but at the cost of losing access to artistic and intellectual Culture. The reality of my life in Westport is very different.

As I took stock of what images I could offer the Women of Westport show this past December, I began to consider how to make them mean more intensely, and so returned to digital manipulation of photographs. There are three of these in this show. The image of my kids and I in the Florida Everglades is from several years ago when I began using the program Painter and a Cintiq pen monitor. I had not figured out how to display digital work properly, and so it stayed digital without a physical existence for several years. When considering what to do with this year’s photography, I tried ordering high quality giclee prints, and was delighted by the richness of the colors and the vividness of the images. Two of my larger images, “Inner Life” and “Looking Out at the Fair” are digitally manipulations created from multiple photographs using Painter, with the intention of being displayed as large giclee prints. I expect to do more of these in the future.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse into my year as much as I have enjoyed the year itself.