SRPF

This year’s festival artist is Kris Ekstrand, a west coast painter and printmaker. Ekstrand has been long-time Skagit County resident and champion for the arts and environment in western Washington. She has recently relocated to Petaluma, CA and writes, “In California as in Washington, I am captivated by the interplay of contrasting elements: old and new, manmade and natural, the intricate scritch-scratch of surface texture and the beautiful blur of distance.” We had the chance to talk with her about her work and connection to the Skagit River Poetry Foundation.

(Kris in her Petaluma, CA studio)

How has the literary world influenced your work and art-making process?

Reading, writing, and literacy have been an important part of my life and my work from the time I can first remember. I grew up in Northwest Montana, but moved to Seattle as a teenager. My high school literature teacher was the late, great Maria Steinhauser who gave a generation of Queen Anne High School students a college-level writing education during the three years we spent with her. My mother was a writer and an editor who was still working on her memoir of her Minnesota childhood when she died at 101. My husband, Carl Molesworth, has written a dozen or so aviation history books and both of my sisters are gifted writers. I have been the director of the state booksellers association, the owner of a small press, the editor of a couple of books and the illustrator of several others.

During the inceptive years of the Skagit River Poetry Festival, I was executive director of Seattle’s Northwest Bookfest, one of the country’s largest literary festivals, and we collaborated on a number of projects. My friends have been writers, typographers, book artists, and booksellers. My visual art does not refer, literally, to the written word. However, I cannot imagine observing the world around me, formulating visual ideas about it and making decisions about how to express those ideas, without an innate understanding of the written word. Painting is very much an editorial process: conception, approach, content and a great deal of taking stuff out and then putting it back in. Reading and writing have helped me think like a writer while I learn, every day,