Art by Northwest

Naval Air Station Whidbey Island is home to the new Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.

Open year round, this museum features a lovingly restored World War II Catalina and celebrates naval aviation through exhibits, tours, reenlistments and events.

Information at PNWNAM.org.

As an artist, I think you just look for moments of sensitivity.

You move through the world and see what lights you up.

Listening lights me up in this way that it takes attention and it takes time.

And I always think of listening as a form of love.

I really have that kind of a connection with it.

That's what I'm interpreting visually.

Nestled in the eastern foothills of the North Cascade Range, Twisp sits at the confluenc of the Methow and Twisp rivers.

It's the largest town in the scenic Methow valley, which was named for the Indigenous plateau people who have lived in the region for millennia.

After settlers arrived, Twisp became the birthplace of "smoke jumping," a way of fighting wildfires from the sky.

In 1939 the parachute program was based in a US Forest Service complex downtown, and in 2009 the buildings were reborn as TwispWorks, an artist-run collective.

One of the TwispWorks artists is painter Perri Lynch Howard, who translates natural soundscapes into abstract landscapes.

She moved here from Seattl 11 years ago in search of quiet.

Now Howard explores the Methow wildlife area, setting up her microphones and sinking into the sound.

So when you're out here and you start listening and you're hearing the things both close and far away... are you hearing a story?

- Yeah.

It's not dissimilar for me from looking at a painting where there's objects or subject matter in the foreground, and then there's that sort of muddled, vague middle ground.

- Yeah.

- And then there's that atmospheric perspective in the far distance.

Yeah.

Like I'm really trying to create a sense of fullness.

I try to bring that visual art sensibility to my listening.

And when I'm listening, I'm really listening for the space between sounds more than any particular sound.

I am drawn to edges.

I choose where to set up my gear based on the edges that are present, and so edges are places of like tension and growth and interaction, just because they tend to be a little more dynamic.

So now we just stand here very quietly and breathe very slowly.

[birds calling] Howard was attuned to sound even as a kid growing up in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

She relished the crunch of sticks underfoot, the wind in sailboa rigging, the reverb in a church.

Returning to her studio, Howard looks at the recordings using a spectrogram and oscillogram.

These graphs give her a clearer sense of the audio patterns, whether staccato bursts, low hums, or soft shushing.

It sounds good.

It sounds great.

Yeah.

[insects buzzing] Totally visualizing where we were.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

[birds calling] So then I'll play these back through while I paint.

When you look at the world through this lens of listening, what we can start to understand is what healthy biodiversity looks like.

You want lots of complexity and dots and dashes and dark marks and light marks.

When you start to see big, long swaths of gray, you know, that's sort of like the white noise that humans bring to their environment.

In your artist mind, are you already seeing imagery that you want to incorporate into the piece that you would make from this?

Absolutely.

Like I'm looking at the rhythm and the pattern and also remembering the palette or the chromatic aspects of being in the landscape.

Howard translates her impressions into a sketchbook, where she begins to map out the natural music heard during the audio monitoring sessions.

What are some of the things that you remember from yesterday?

The Red-winged Blackbird.

- The Red-winged Blackbird.

Yes, yes.

- All over yeah.. - Trill!

Do do do.

Conk-a-ree.

Conk-a-ree.

And this will be just sort of, you know, it's just a visual reminder of what we experienced.

For her "Frequencies" series, Howard travels to vulnerable ecosystems, capturing what they sound like before they are forever altered by climate change and human encroachment.

Though these landscapes aren't literal.

The color palette recalls each place the deep black of the Arctic Circle, piney greens of Central Oregon, and gray blues of the Olympic Peninsula.

Howard loves the spontaneity of painting and starts by swishing a squeegee across a wood panel.

I'm so excited about this color you chose.

Do you like that one?

- Yes.

How does it fit with what we're going to see?

- How does it fit with what we're going to see... Surprisingly, all of the works, even the ones that have real earth tones, start with a super bright underpainting, and then we'll see where it goes.

In some ways, I feel like I get to make the world on my own terms when I'm painting, and I really love that feeling.

But it's definitely telling me what to do more than I'm telling it what to do.

- When people see your works, do they see them instantly as environmental pieces?

- I'm surprised at how many peop will look at my paintings, and then they'll ask me, they'll say, "Is this about climate change?"

Really?

So frequently.

And it's something about maybe the mapping and monitoring, you know, but it may also just be we're aware that the rhythms of the planet are changing and that this is sort of mapping those rhythms.

Increasing wildfires in the Methow Valley have coincided with a shift in animal sounds, including a decrease in frog chorus and birdsong.

Howard's paintings are like snapshots that record this ecological moment, and her emotional experience of these places.

After sanding the surface to add depth, she begins her metaphorical mapping, adding a grid and locus points to the surging sound waves.

Radial lines stretc toward the back of the painting, an audio vanishing point that draws you into the distance.

- Do you feel like there's hope in your work?

I really do.

I mean, there's still so much to save.

It's a softer narrative.

It's a more poetic and heart-based place that I want to reach people.

The advocacy piece of my work is super important to me, but I also want it to serve as a counterpoint to more prevailing narratives about things and have it reside as a question rather than an answer, as a story, not a statistic.

And hopefully that will help people adopt a new way of thinking about some of these dire concerns of our time.

By painting ecological soundscapes, Howard urges us to listen closely to our own surroundings... and pause to let the quiet places reveal sounds worth saving.

This series was made possible in part with the generous support of Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.