Robbie Pease's digital photographs capture the rich, luminous colors of unreconstructed nature. Lush green leaves surround pink and lavender and violet petals that seem stolen from the palette of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. It's hard to believe the pictures are not doctored.
"I don't mess with them," says Pease, a Magnolia resident for the past five years. He is 37. The survivor of a brutal hit-and-run accident when he was 18, he is the sort of artist about whom people drop such words as "inspirational" and "courageous."
All true. Yet don't let that get in the way of the fact that he is damn good, too. He has an exquisite eye, and that ineffable knack - Mapplethorpe had it, as did Ansel Adams and Walker Evans - for suffusing his work with a sense of infinite patience and serenity. And he's only been at it a year. "Don't laugh," Pease says when he reveals his "beginner" status.
The accident Pease was in, in 1988, killed the driver of the motorcycle upon which he was riding and put Pease in a coma for two months. After he awoke, it was another two years before he was discharged from the hospital, in 1990. Now he gets around in a motorized wheelchair, which he shares with Palazzo, his almost narcotically subdued 3-year-old Pekinese. The dog's name means "lunatic" in Italian.
People aren't disabled, alarm systems are, but Pease does speak and move with some difficulty. Back in 2004, some folks at Fishermen's Terminal, accustomed to seeing him struggle to take pictures with one hand and a big camera, chipped in and bought Pease a lightweight digital number. His friend Peter then devised a tripod that mounts to his wheelchair. Such simple generosity can break your heart. Pease was on his way.
"I like nature," he says, explaining his choice of flowers as a subject, though the first time his lens captured a flower was pretty much serendipitous. He was snapping pictures of Pazzo romping in a park, and when he printed out the photos, he discovered that he really liked the way the flora in the background showed up, colorful and various. He liked the way it looked.
Now he hunts flowers, traveling around the city searching out the exotic and the colorful, objects to fall under his slow, meticulous routine of adjusting perspective and focus. Pease says he's learned the names of many of the plants he shoots, though not all of them. His favorite portrait is of a pink rose.
He is self-taught; never took a class, hasn't seen the work of many other photographers. His is a talent acquired through diligence and passion. The name of his photography company is Busy Bee.
Some of his photographs truly surprise - you wouldn't think a thing that surreally gorgeous and deeply tropical looking could grow in notoriously green-and-brown Seattle. As with the best art, Pease's work isolates and amplifies and then re-embeds everyday reality, granting the viewer a new way of seeing. New eyes.
Some of his favorite sites are the Ballard Locks, the Magnolia Florist in the Village, Swanson's Nursery and the Volunteer Park Conservatory. Pease says he shoots almost every day, sometimes all day. What he's looking for? Simple: "Beauty."
He's had three shows already, two in Ballard and one running now through Aug. 6 at Tully's Coffee in Magnolia Village, 3223 W. McGraw St. (Call 282-3191). He's sold four or five pictures already, which is three or four more than he's ever sold. Perhaps people are finally starting to take notice.[[In-content Ad]]
