For this is the hall of light
and only the
dancer and the pure of heart
find their way here.
– Robert Sund
The image begins on a summer day, edging into evening. Artist Maggie Wilder, with video camera, is atop Sauk Mountain looking down at the meandering Skagit River. The light turns monochromatic, bouncing off the water, and the river is a long winding silver ribbon. “Suddenly I feel suspended in this thickening light,” says the painter.
It’s the sight that inspired Wilder’s 2012 Skagit River Poetry Festival poster, from the atmospheric painting In the Hall of Light: Sauk Mountain. It may look abstract, she says, but it’s very close to what she saw that summer evening. “I’m awed by how the earth and water and sky constantly dissolve into each other. It’s never clear where one starts and another ends.”
The painting draws on a single video frame, taken that evening for her 2010 documentary on Robert Sund, an iconic Northwest poet and artist who lived a simple, spiritual, creative life alongside the Skagit River.
That river also winds through the art and imagination of Wilder, who lives beside it and finds inspiration in Sund’s life and art. “He influenced the way I live, the choice of simplicity,” she says. “And for me, listening to his poetry is like going to church.”
Wilder, who studied painting at the University of Washington and filmmaking at Evergreen State College. is part-owner of the Cygnus Gallery in La Conner. Her sister, Georgia Johnson, is a poet regularly featured in the festival.
Wilder sees intriguing commonalities between the visual and the writing arts. “Poetry and painting are both distillations,” she says. “An image lives in me a long time before I paint it. I hear people talking about writing the same way: Something starts to grow inside you and you don’t know what shape it will take.”
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ARTIST’S STATEMENT: For the last fifteen years I’ve lived on the lower Skagit River. The perspective I have of the life of the river comes from a meditation on relative motion and the scale of time. When I came to live on the river it was in order to slow down my life. I did this by accepting a great deal of “inconvenience.” The bargain would be I would not have to hurry. The slower I lived, the more stillness I allowed, the faster and more dynamic the river and the world became. Soon I was experiencing the river and the riparian habitat as something with a life and desire of its own.
– Maggie Wilder, October 2010
