Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/15/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/15/18

Liberty Bank co-founders: George Tokuda

I'm starting to make faces -- collaged faces -- for the Liberty Bank Building portrait series.

This is George Tokuda, one of the original Liberty Bank's nine co-founders. He and his family owned Tokuda Drugs, a longtime fixture of Seattle's Central District. community.

His daughter Wendy Tokuda was kind enough to send me the original photo of George; she remembers "how proud he was to be on the bank board. It’s where I got my college loan!"

George was a native Washingtonian, born around 1913 in Mukilteo where Japanese immigrants worked for a lumber company. The area (now a hiking trail and nature preserve) is still known as Japanese Gulch.

George's family later moved down to Seattle, where he opened the drugstore in 1935. But as a Japanese American in the Pacific Northwest during World War II, he was one of thousands rounded up and sent to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.

*Photo credit: Minidoka Historical Site/ NPS*

Learning how much George gave to his communities -- and how much was taken from him -- I find the city of Mukilteo's logo and welcome sign painfully ironic.

So I altered my photo of this lighthouse sign...

... replacing the lighthouse tower with the ruins of the Minidoka guard and entrance gate.

I'm deeply grateful to Wendy Tokuda, the Mukilteo Historical Society, HistoryLink and the Liberty Bank photo archives for the opportunity to honor Mr. Tokuda.

Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/8/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/8/18

Resin-ating with history

I'm gonna have some fun with newsprint and resin paper. Have you ever tried this technique?

I plan to use it in the collage portraits I'm making for the Liberty Bank Building apartments. If you've seen my work, you know I often layer translucent images over patterned paper and other materials.

For this project, I get to incorporate newspaper clippings about the bank from that time. Not the originals -- I'm copying the images onto newsprint.

I'll add fine art paper to the collages for color, mostly from my current hoard. (It's not "hoarding" per se if you use it eventually.)

Later, I'll start piecing together "suits" for each founder. My paper stash gives me a lot of options here, but I may have to pass up some of my favorite patterns. These folks were founding a bank in the late 1960s, after all. I'll try to avoid anything too wild, but again... no promises.

Lisa Myers Bulmash 5/25/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 5/25/18

Makers gonna make... at a slower pace

For the first time in maybe two years, I have only one project to work on: collage portraits for the Liberty Bank Building.

I enjoyed people-ing at the "Locally Sourced" reception, and sharing my butterflies with everyone.

But my brain craves alone-time, preferably in the studio.

So I took a week or two not doing much of anything, as the experts suggest you do after a big project. It's been a welcome change not to finish something in a week, or schedule events that won't happen for months in the future. Still a few deadlines, but they're not within days of each other.

It might take a few more months of this: my brain refuses to attempt more abstract things like goal-setting. So I intend to keep things low-key (ha!) for the summer, but I'm not making any promises.