Article on Bend Bulletin's website.

Crystal Clear
Sisters’ Lynn Woodward shows “Ice Gazing” exhibit
By Eleanor Pierce, October 29. 2010

Lynn Woodward has done a lot of different jobs in her life. She’s wrangled horses, she’s skinned birds for biologists. She once worked for a veterinarian, and for a time punched a clock at a deli. More recently, she’s spent many years working as a freelance graphic and Web designer.

But through it all, she’s also had a camera in her hand.
“I’ve been a photographer all my life,” she said.

A show of Woodward’s fine art photography will be on display Monday though the end of the year at Sisters Art Works.

Woodward partly credits her dad, Doug Woodward, a writer and photographer who now lives in Franklin, N.C., with getting her hooked on cameras. Sitting down in her studio recently to talk about her work, she pulled out a handful of black-and-white prints she and her dad took on a trip to a wintry lake somewhere in northern Georgia.

In one, Woodward, probably about 15 at the time, poses playfully for the camera.

Several other of the images she took herself, including detailed shots of ice crystals on top of the water.

“I saw (my dad) taking a lot of pictures,” she said. “It was just natural, I learned from him a very intuitive side of photography.”
Now at 47, she said photography has moved closer to the forefront of her path.

She still does some graphic design work and freelance writing for publications like The Nugget, but she also takes a lot of photos, including portrait work. One specialty she’s developed is photography for musicians (Woodward herself sings and plays a few instruments in the local band Anvil Blasters).

Her current show, “Ice Gazing,” features images taken over a two-day period in January.

Woodward said she was taking her two dogs — a 12-year old border collie named Cory and a nearly 2-year-old shepherd mix named Jessie Jane — out for their morning walk when she saw some unusual ice that had formed in ruts in a dirt road.

“We were having really wet weather and not much snow,” she said. “It kept getting warm and raining and freezing at night, and it was raining so much there were puddles on the ground.”
Woodward, who got her bachelor’s degree in science, not art, said the particular shapes of the ice crystals, which twist and splay about in long shards, is the result of a slow freeze.
“The slower the solidification of a liquid, the more time the molecules have to get organized,” she said, drawing back on knowledge from geology class.

As soon as she saw the ice, she turned around and got her camera.

For the show, Woodward has printed several series of the shots she took by walking along the ruts, stopping every foot or so to take a new photo. She had the images printed on canvas, and each complete piece hanging in the show is a long collage of prints lined up with an imperfect, offset edge, anywhere from three to 21 frames.

Woodward said she loves staring at the crystals and seeing different images and shapes appear before her eyes; she compared it to cloud gazing. She plans to hang a scroll of paper below each piece in the show, and will invite viewers to draw, sketch, or write about what they see in the crystals.

Some of her titles suggest imagery she discovered in the ice, like “Raven’s Bones,” “Snowflake on Lace,” and “Starfish Cartwheels.” But she was interested in finding out what other people saw.
“Why limit it to my imagination?” she said.

Woodward has lived in Central Oregon for about 10 years. After growing up partly in New England and partly in the south, she decided to move out West.

“I just loved the sky and the space,” she said. She enrolled in Colorado College, where she earned a bachelor of arts in biology. She laughs now about the path she’s taken, farther from science and toward the arts. She said in college, the worst grade she ever got was in an art class.

For several years, she moved around with her husband of 13 years, who was working on his master’s and doctorate in isotope geochemistry.

“His path was very directed, and I kind of fit in where I could,” she said. Woodward was 37 and had been living on Cape Cod for a couple of years with her husband when the couple divorced.“As soon as I got divorced I headed back out west,” she said.

She now lives near Sisters with her two dogs, and her “sweetheart,” Pete Rathbun. He’s a proofreader at The Nugget, and Woodward said he’s been a big help prepping the show, using his woodworking skills to create a French cleat hanging system.

This isn’t Woodward’s first fine art photography show. She’s had several, including a show of photos she took on a 2005 trip to Iceland with one of her brothers and her mother, Ann Kendall, who also lives in Sisters.

Another set of Woodward’s work is currently on display at the Depot Deli in Sisters. The photos were taken while Woodward was visiting another of her siblings (she has five), who was studying in Costa Rica. Woodward sells prints from the trip, all vibrantly-colored studies on Costa Rican nature, to benefit the remote Costa Rican indigenous Bribri village of Yorkin, which was severely damaged by flooding in 2008.