Lumber Mills in Bellingham Bay

In 1933, about the time she made this print, Elizabeth Colborne moved to her cabin in the Pacific Northwest to paint. The cold, rainy weather did not always cooperate. She wrote in her diary, “I did not come down here to burn up trees but to paint them. But it rains, so I have to burn.” The entry illustrates Colborne’s affection for the natural beauty of the Northwest. It also illustrates how it must have pained her to see these logs awaiting the saw mills in the waters of Bellingham, Washington, where she grew up. How did Colborne create such a fascinating modernist woodcut? As a student in New York in the early 1910s, she had one of the most famous art teachers in America: Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922). Dow’s teaching was inspired by the design of Japanese woodblock prints, and we can see Colborne applying Japanese design elements to this industrial setting. For example, she simplified the shapes and focused on patterns, like the mass of parallelograms on the dock. She used flat, unshaded colors and carefully harmonized them. And she minimized the illusion of depth, instead giving the impression that, except for the diagonal plumes of smoke, each section of the print is simply stacked on top of the one below it.