Known best for her greeting card photos of Vashon dogs in cars, Rondi Lightmark is a consummate artist who has applied creativity to every aspect of her life.
“I’ve never been trained to do anything before I did it,” Lightmark said. “I just do it, then try to figure out how. Inspiration always provides me the juice to do something new.”
Her journey started 20 years ago when she lost her husband to cancer and used the experience to launch herself on a creative journey that ultimately led her to Vashon Island.
Despite her whimsical name, Lightmark appears to take nothing lightly, using her life as a resource for learning. Inspiration has been her driver.
“Not only was life, like Jim (her husband) whimsical, deep and miraculous,” she said, “it was giving me a huge tutorial.”
After caring for her terminally ill husband, then her mother and two friends over a 10-year period, Lightmark earned a master’s degree in psychology so she could counsel others through the grieving process she herself was living. In that process, Lightmark said, she developed a different philosophy about death, grief and the course of life. When life is blown wide open, she says, there’s a shattering.
“We think we have to pick up the pieces all alone,” she adds, “but the Universe is going to bring you joy no matter what. Trust and a sense of wonder are essential for becoming the new self that is trying to emerge.”
After her husband’s death, Lightmark decided to give herself three years to launch a professional writing career. And she succeeded. An open letter in her local Vermont pager that she wrote to her husband led to a freelance position writing arts and education pieces and eventually to magazine work. By 1998, Lightmark had co-written a book about the spiritual aspects of dog training with expert April Frost.
Dogs. Lightmark calls them “guardian spirits” and claims to have loved them — and creating greeting cards — since childhood.
She arrived on Vashon 10 years ago to be close to her children. Here, she took a black and white photo of her daughter’s dogs, in a rustic structure on KVI Beach and the result was the start of what became a nine-year celebration of Vashon dogs … mostly in cars.
That photo also inspired Lightmark’s thriving business in greeting cards. With encouragement from people like Priscilla Schleigh of Giraffe on Vashon, Lightmark found herself possessed by the whimsical and sometimes profound images of Vashon dogs.
“I found myself celebrating the marvelous spirits in these animals who go with us everywhere,” she said.
Her company is the only one in the world with this particular focus. The dogs Lightmark photographs are not identifiable pedigrees; they are personalities. Those personalities inspire the captions she adds to the cards. Lightmark applies her creative sensibilities to capture images that touch human hearts, and the captions, she says, come later to amplify the message in the photo.
“Creating these images,” she says, “is healing for me.” She adds that she hopes they’re healing for others as well. Most of Lightmark’s cards are not aimed at a particular occasion.
“I’ve learned that the responses people have to my images are very personal, so I don’t want to constrain their use.”
Nine years ago Lightmark created 24 images of Vashon dogs with captions, printing and folding greeting cards herself on demand as island stores requested them. Today, her 2014 catalogue sports 96 images — her best sellers — and, through a printing and fulfillment house in San Francisco, Lightmark now sells her cards nationwide, in Canada and as far away as Australia with a current print run of 96,000. All Vashon dogs and now some cats.
Once again, taking inspiration as opportunity, Lightmark has learned photographic imaging, marketing, promotion, accounting, distribution and website design along her journey with Vashon pets.
“I do it all “from initial photograph through final sale,” she said. That was all true until this year when demand for her cards grew to the point that she had to hand over printing and distribution to the San Francisco company.
Despite her growing business, Lightmark says she knows each animal in her images and the humans they’re attached to. In fact, her current collection of cards includes stories of each on the back. Captions on the front speak to the moment she’s captured like Bearwatcher, a Golden retriever/Great Pyrenees mix, beloved companion of Eva De Loach, leaning out the window of his human’s 1994 Nissan SUV to quote composer Richard Wagner with “Joy is not in things. It is in us.” On the back of the card Lightmark tells the year, make and model of the car in the shot along with the story of how she got the photo. She always asks permission from the dogs’ humans to use their images and, when they result in a card, she gives the humans 12 freebies.
“It’s a love exchange,” says Lightmark.
As her business has grown, so has Lightmark’s wish to make her creations serve purposes beyond the business.
“Ultimately I’d like to see these images in senior centers, as well as inner city schools and health care facilities where they can inspire a smile or two,” she says.
She’s already sharing the joy and a percentage of the proceeds from her sales with animal rescue organizations she believes in. People can go to Lightmark’s website at www.lightmarkarts.com and find not only the 2014 catalogue of cards, but opportunities to donate to Vashon Island Pet Protectors and two other animal rescue organizations. People can also share photos of their favorite pets and find out how to use Lightmark Press products in their organization’s fundraising efforts.
People can also purchase their favorite Lightmark cards and read the blog that has begun chronicling Lightmark’s experiences with Vashon dogs, stories of humor and
poignancy that speak to all.
Lightmark’s message to Vashon animal lovers is that she would love to celebrate every dog and cat on Vashon.
“I want people to know that if their dog’s photo doesn’t turn into a card it’s only due to my own creative or time limitations,” she said.
Lightmark says she is forever grateful to Vashon-Maury Island for nurturing her love of dogs and the business from which she still draws daily delight.
