Sitka Mariner Shows Work Inspired by Work

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Created on Monday, 09 December 2024 15:29

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Large linocut prints of working boats plying the waters of Sitka Sound, the Inside Passage and far beyond are on display on the walls of the Backdoor Cafe, along with smaller works depicting birds, Japanese folktales and more.
    The artist is Adrienne Wilber, who said the nine large boat-centric pieces are of personal significance to her and her family. She’s been a crew member on all but one of the boats in the pictures. Her parents are longtime Sitkans Mollie Kabler and Charlie Wilber, and Adrienne, who now lives in Seattle, was born and raised here. She has a sister, Berett, in Anchorage.

Adrienne Wilber pulls a linocut print. (Photo provided by Kendall Rock)

Artwork by Adrienne Wilber is on display at the Back Door Cafe this month. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

    Adrienne’s connection with boats, and as a licensed mariner, began as a child helping out on her dad’s troller, the F/V Alexa K. From there she progressed to jobs on tugboats, pocket cruise ships, longliners and sailboats.
    “Being part of ship work necessitates being gone and being apart from your community, and it’s also a very romantic sounding job,” Adrienne said in an interview. “People get really excited about it and want to know about it, and some parts of it are very cool and romantic, but also some parts of it are just like, ‘This is just a job. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it’s great.’ And so part of doing the art of the boats was because I know people are always interested, and are asking about, ‘What boat are you working on? Where are you going?’ And I also personally just like them, and think they’re cool.”
    The title of the Backdoor display is “Vessels,” and Wilber calculates she’s spent a total of 1,161 days at sea on the boats in these pictures.
    The 24- by 18-inch linocuts of boats have elaborate borders Wilber designed, based on the style she recalls from books by Jan Brett that she read as a child.
    “What I was trying to communicate with the borders was a little bit about the story of the boat, or my memories of working on the boat, because so much more goes into working on the boats and living on the boats than just what they look like from the outside,” Wilber said.
    The borders on the print of Charlie Wilber’s Alexa K show fishing gear, a sampling of the boat’s catch, and a scene of a day at sea.
    Two prints are of square-rigged tall ships resembling those from the era before steam power. But these are ones that Wilber has crewed on, crossing oceans in the process.
    “That’s how I started working on larger ships, and from working on larger ships, that’s how I got my Coast Guard license going,” the artist said. The experience led to work on smaller Southeast cruise ships, and then on tugboats. “So every step just built upon the last one,” she said.
    Her experience on the tall ships was with the nonprofit Sea Education Association, which is affiliated with the University of Boston.
    As for her artwork, Wilber’s latest projects involve a method known as chine collé, in which she adds color by gluing in small pieces of tissue paper. While the black and white linocut boats are the mainstay of the exhibit, there are also birds native to the Pacific Northwest, incorporating colors added by he chine collé process.
    At present, Wilber is a crewmember on tugboats towing freight barges through the Inside Passage from Washington state to Southeast, and sometimes farther, to Prince William Sound and the Bering Sea.
    She said the tugboat Georgeann is the only boat in the Backdoor display that she hasn’t worked on as crew. But there is a family connection: at one time her father was on the crew of the Georgeann, which is operated by Sitka-owned Samson Tug and Barge Co.
    Wilber said one of her favorite memories of time on the water is the day she spotted white black bears – known as spirit bears – on the coast of British Columbia.
    The linocut prints are, as the name suggests, carved into linoleum panels, and then printed onto paper, either by hand or by press –– Wilber used both methods over the years to create the art now on display. The Backdoor was the site of her first art display years ago, and before this one she had one there three years ago.
    Other pieces in the show are a picture of a dog she met when ashore in Ketchikan while repairs were made to the boat she was on that had an engine fire in Glacier Bay; a self-portrait from the same ill-fated voyage; and a series of prints of Japanese Tanuki, or racoon dog, figures. In one of the pictures, two Tanuki play chess with Mt. Fuji in the backdrop, an homage to the 19th century print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji,” by Hokusai.
    Wilber received a scholarship from the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle for her work, and has also had access to studio space with the Seattle Print Arts Association. She hopes to continue expanding her artistic abilities while working aboard a tugboat, her current ship of choice.
    “As far as the career stuff, I’m working on tugboats for the foreseeable future,” she said. “The boats that I work on bring the AML barges up here, so when you’re in Sea Mart eating your yogurt, or in Sea Mart being like, ‘Where’s the yogurt?’ You know who to think of.”