Island photographer Lori Kay likes shapes. The more repetitive the shape is, the better. They grab her attention as does color, especially the wildly saturated colors of the spectrum. So when Kay saw an oddly shaped rowboat painted a vibrant red and tied up under the repetitive arches at Dockton Park marina, she zeroed in on her subject and snapped a winning photograph. “Ginny,” as the photograph — and rowboat — is called, recently won the Judge’s Award in Still Life at the annual Artist Association of Ocean Shores contest.
Meanwhile back on Vashon, Kay’s photo image Giclée fine art prints are brightening the walls at Café Luna in an exhibit that opened last month and is being held over until the end of May. Called “Metal & Glass,” the show is a still life study of abandoned factory buildings and machinery near the Aberdeen waterfront. Kay said each photograph stands alone, but as a group “these images provide a sense of the harsh edges of human labor. … The industrial metal and glass engaged my fascination for the possibilities it presented.”
To achieve the results she wanted — transforming stark objects and hard edges into painterly images — Kay spent long hours on each photograph, adjusting the color and applying digital techniques that mimic what she learned as a student working in the dark room of her high school. The original photograph ended up providing the bones for Kay’s new creative process.
“In this show the (bones) are the steel doors, the cross-hatched windows, the multiplicity of lines. The images have almost no color, so I had to add that. I wanted to use colors that were complimentary to the repetitive shapes.”
Though Kay loves color, there was a brief time in her life when she went colorblind, which she discovered on her way to take the California bar exam. Kay had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was 19, and over the course of her life the disease has raised its debilitating head when she experiences a great deal of stress. And as a defense attorney in Seattle and the only women for a long time who took murder cases on a regular basis, Kay and stress were well acquainted. When Kay received a second life-changing diagnosis in 2004, she closed the door on the legal world and opened a new one that led to her 20-year pursuit of photography.
An island resident since 1992, Kay has exhibited at various venues on the island including Heron’s Nest, where she was the featured artist last October, and where her work remains on continuous display.
Kay is not sure if she’ll continue with the Giclée process, saying the series was unique and special for the Aberdeen subjects, but she liked using the new techniques because of what it allowed her to do.
“To create the image seen in my mind when I took the photograph takes thought and technical work, along with software tools. The result of this work … is a photograph showing my intent, my ‘mind’s eye’ view of the subject photographed.”
