Kate Breakey

For the past several years, photographer, screenwriter, and author Bill Wittliff has been placing photographic paper inside beer cans, tubes made of PVC, and other cylindrical containers and affixing them to posts, trees, and other vertical supports on his Plum Creek Ranch near Luling, Texas. Wittliff pokes pinholes in the containers and allows the sun to "paint" on the paper over periods that can last anywhere from a few days to a year. The resulting solargraphs are, as art photographer Kate Breakey suggests, a record of "the slow turning of the earth, without the details: the gradual passing of time at Plum Creek." In SunriseSunset: Solargraphs from Plum Creek, this relentlessly inventive writer and artist has gathered some of his favorite creations, offering them as a visual tribute to the interaction of a particular place within the great arc of the cosmos. He shares with readers his delight upon discovering the technique through a chance encounter. He confesses an infectious enthusiasm for harvesting such unpredictable products of light and time as he roams with his canine companion Louie across a locale he describes as "a continuous miracle. . . . I want to see new worlds on a piece of paper . . . I want to be astonished . . . I'm always greedy for another miracle." Kate Breakey's foreword sets an affectionate, thoughtful tone for this stirring artwork, followed by the literary observations of photographer, educator, and artist Keith Carter. But the bulk of SunriseSunset is given over to page after page of mysterious, other-worldly, evocative images etched by "the slow turning of the earth" and the fertile imagination of the author.

Winner, Gold Award, Texas Association of Museums Wilder Awards, 2011“I begin with a silver photographic image, a kind of evidence. Then I paint on this in many transparent layers of oil paint and pencil. If I am lucky, the media combine and become enmeshed, a curious union of what was real with my own exaggerations and embellishments, so I can show how beautiful it all is-the light, the form, the texture, and color-because I am a sensualist, and this is my deepest pleasure, my lovely addiction.” -Kate BreakeyKate Breakey is internationally recognized for large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs, including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers, animals, and insects. Since 1980, her work has appeared in more than seventy one-person exhibitions and more than fifty group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France. Breakey's work is held in many public collections, including the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.Painted Light is the first career retrospective of Breakey's work. With images from nine suites of photographs, including Laws of Physics, Principles of Mathematics, Still Life, Loose Ends, Memories and Dreams, Cactus, and Small Deaths, it encompasses a quarter century of prolific image-making and reveals the wide range of Breakey's creative explorations. In her introduction and throughout the book, Breakey offers personal accounts of "the things that matter most" to her life as an artist and traces her influences, among them her fascination with classical European painting, her close connection to the world of science, and her heartfelt love of the natural world, which began during her childhood in rural Australia. These texts give considerable insight into Breakey's beautiful images, creative process, and transformative journey "to distill observations into a visual language in which they can be contemplated"-the motive that inspires all of Breakey's work.