‘Being with Kelp,’ a one woman show

‘Showcase 2025’ with 15 artists also opens at Northwind Art

By Kirk Boxleitner
Posted 1/29/25

 

 

Large-scale views of ocean life are set to share space with an assortment of area artists, working in an eclectic array of media, at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

E-mail
Password
Log in

‘Being with Kelp,’ a one woman show

‘Showcase 2025’ with 15 artists also opens at Northwind Art

Posted

 

 

Large-scale views of ocean life are set to share space with an assortment of area artists, working in an eclectic array of media, at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery in downtown Port Townsend.

The same day that “Showcase 2025” starts presenting creations by 15 artists from Port Townsend, Sequim, Seattle, Freeland and beyond at 701 Water St., that same space will kick off artist, swimmer and sea kayaker Shawna Marie Franklin’s “Being with Kelp” one-woman show.

Both exhibitions begin Jan. 30, while Franklin and a number of the displayed “Showcase 2025” makers plan to be available at the Jeanette Best Gallery to meet the public from 5-8 p.m. for the First Saturday Art Walk on Feb. 1. The gallery’s regular hours are noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays.

As a professional ocean kayaker, Franklin has been submerged in enough kelp to feel and even taste it, which has inspired her to show others a side of the world they might not otherwise see.

As a painter and printmaker, Franklin has created dozens of works, with titles including “Blue Mind,” “Counter-Current,” “Holdfast,” “Buoyancy” and “Under My Kayak,” with those paintings being exhibited beside smaller framed “Kelp Series” monoprints, collagraphs and monotypes.

Northwind is also scheduling a date and time for the Orcas Island artist to return and deliver a free artist talk in February.

According to Franklin, traveling in a kayak brings you into close contact with the kelp zone, so “you’re able to peer over the side and look down, and you’re seeing things you would never see when you’re walking on land.”

Having personally observed such a place, “filled with color, light and inspiration … a dreamlike world,” Franklin has gone on to product artworks that’s “abstracted from reality, for sure,” but which nonetheless explores details such as “how the sea catches and bends the light from the sun,” making for “a vortex of water and sunshine” In her monoprints.

Franklin, who turns 60 this year, said her experiences with nature and the water in particular have ranged from working as a field biologist in northern California and Puerto Rico to 18 years as a coach and co-owner of a paddlesports school in the San Juan Islands.

Franklin and her husband, Leon Somme, operated Body Boat Blade International, a company that specialized in sea kayak instruction and gear, until 2019. Early on they embarked on expeditions alongside kayaker Chris Duff, circumnavigating Iceland by sea kayak and paddling 1,600 nautical miles in 81 days in 2003, making Franklin, then 38, the first woman to complete that circuit.

Franklin and Somme went on to circumnavigate the islands of Haida Gwaii in 2007, and Vancouver Island in 2012, but after her husband developed medical issues that prevented him from kayaking, Franklin returned to her childhood love of art, her mother took her to art museums.

“I don’t know when it hit me, but I realized I could be an artist,” said Franklin, who attended Gage Academy in Seattle, studied with artists Terry L. Johnson and Klara Glosova, and earned a Botanical Art Society diploma.

Franklin has had solo shows on Orcas Island, and partaken in group shows in California, Oregon and Colorado.

Franklin’s “Being with Kelp” exhibition, which runs through March 31, includes pieces that give viewers the perspective of being in the ocean, looking up at the sky.

“A lot of experimentation happens on the canvas,” said Franklin, explaining that her paintings and prints start from rough sketches and build from light to dark, layering transparent and opaque colors.

“I have to be open to letting it go where it wants to go,” she said, adding that she moves “through a process of discovery” as “the shades underneath come through.”