An Artist-Led Collective
Larry Calkins
Visual Artist
Bio: Larry is an artist and instructor at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. His art draws inspiration from the hearsay stories of the Harlan Valley, a remote logging and farming community where he was raised in central Oregon, and where his family’s history goes back five generations. Today, whether he is creating woodcut prints to raise money for animal rescue, or fashioning his signature Shaker-style dress sculptures, throughout it all run threads of lore and hilarity, darkness and hope.
On symbolism: “I developed my own symbols that mark my narratives: for example, the burning house represents change and disruption. Other houses stand for stability and connectedness, a place to be from or to belong. Rabbits and birds that populate my imagery are interchangeably good and evil, male and female, strong or weak. Appearances can be deceptive.”
On medium: His career started in photography, but soon hopscotched in new directions, such as encaustics, printmaking, bookmaking, and sculpture. He’s often drawn to simple materials and objects with a patina of history: rusted metal, found cloth, and scraps of wood.
On the margins: Larry began exhibiting in 1994 at the MIA Gallery in Seattle, which the Seattle Times wrote “specialized in showing work by self-taught artists, a genre that is related to folk art and so-called ‘outsider’ art.” He is currently represented by the American Primitive Gallery in New York, Rice Polak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Tanner Hill in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
On simplicity: “When you are closer to nature, you are more content. Birds replace radios. Evening sky replaces TV.”
On getting unstuck: “Make a present for someone.”
Hometown: Harlan, Oregon
Ode to home:
“It is dusk always in the hills of Harlan.
Dusk is the color of waking dreams.
Everything happens at evening-tide.”
His favorite place near Issaquah: Tiger Mountain, where Larry and his architect wife, Sabine, constructed their house by themselves in the late 1980s. It took three years to complete. Larry’s art studio was the first structure they built.
Find Larry: