quieter days | artist statement

By Alan Lau, 2020

Most of the studios I have inhabited in this city have been “glorified closets” that fit my dwindling pocket book more than being ideal choices. And I’ve moved whenever the rent tripled or before the impending doom of a wrecking ball cleared the block for more condos or new, skinny townhouses. Most of the work you see here stems from a period of solitude when I had run out of excuses not to go to my studio. My wife had often been gone for months tending to an aging mother in Kyoto. I was left alone to my own devices.

I would descend the hill from Seattle’s Phinney Ridge, dragging my sleepy self towards Ballard and turn left at the pizza joint with the wood -fired oven. I’d meander through tree-lined neighborhoods, peruse portable lending libraries of books parked on sidewalk corners. Landmarks included a house with an unusual tree in its front yard with a dictionary sign, the owner no doubt weary of people knocking on his door asking what species of tree it was. Then there was always the big house on the corner in disrepair, no doubt deserted by an artist who could no longer afford the rent. Atop the roof were sculptures of animals and in the yard, scarecrow figures of people that could have come from “The Addams Family.” I knew demolition was not far behind and sure enough, months later a new series of row houses dotted that landscape. I could always count on that little thrill of pleasure bumping into the child-like charm of a ceramic sculptural installation by Jeffrey Mitchell parked in an unassuming location to brighten my day.

As i got closer to the neighborhood near my studio, houses gave way to an industrial corridor on the fringes of gentrification and an undercover divide of roads leading to the Ballard Bridge and points beyond. Here you would find small companies who could afford the cheaper rent and more homegrown breweries than you could imagine with the occasional food truck parked in the driveway. My tiny studio was upstairs in a brown nondescript warehouse, a warren of subdivided spaces cut into makeshift rooms on two floors overlooking a parking lot. Around me were office supply and sporting goods chain stores, a donut shop, a porn shop, an exercise studio, a yoga studio, an eye clinic, and off shoots of retail and social services such a Trader Joe’s, a Fred Meyer, a PCC Community Market and a University of Washington Medical Center.

Coming to this studio (whenever I could breach the physical and psychological distance) was like what my late painter friend Frank Okada would call in his unromantic, laconic manner – “going to the office.” I’d sit in my upstairs studio and just let my mind wander and my hand roam freely across the white silence of paper and the shaping of memory when the heat of summer ebbed into the chill of early autumn drizzle until the wind swept most of the leaves away. What gradually emerged was an evocation of distant thoughts, a line here, dots on a distant horizon, an evening spent in a rural home in Krakow, the haunting fragment of a few blue notes once heard in a Kyoto jazz coffee shop or the remembrance of the taste of fragrant, green tea. quieter days then, is an unofficial record of solitude and the shaping of memory when the bright light of summer drew its shades down to rest under the thin blanket of autumn’s early rain. Perhaps you’ve been in that space before? All I can say then is, “Welcome, welcome to this place.”