On one end of her home studio, a giant three-dimensional steel form stands tall, adorned with butterflies of different colors, dimensions and designs. Impressive in its current form, acclaimed printmaker Evon Zerbetz tells me it’s the skeleton version of what was once the center of a vortex featuring over 1000 hand-printed butterflies for an exhibit there in Ketchikan.
A few steps forward, giant sheets of 22-by-30-inch battleship linoleum lay stacked one atop the other, featuring Zerbetz’s familiar and iconic carving style. Flipping through piece by piece, decades of work flies by: carvings of everything from narwhals and sea monsters to those that made up campaigns for the State of Alaska’s Women, Infants, and Children programming. Ravens stacked atop bears stacked atop dragonflies, proof of decades of ecological observations having slowly and meticulously made their way onto the block.
At the far end of her studio sits the first ever etching press she bought in Seattle decades ago.
“I was looking for a used one for a long time, and then I went to Seattle and I was just going to buy a new one,” Zerbetz said. As fate would have it, while she was in the art supply store she saw an ad for a used press just 30 miles away: Into a van and onto the ferry to Ketchikan it went. “It squeaks, but I love it,” she said of her trusty sidekick.
Arm in arm with that press, squeaks and all, Zerbetz has brought to life her whimsical view of the world through a body of work that celebrates Alaskan ecology and culture: mischief, merriment and all.
Forest Forensics and Journey Books
Born and raised in Ketchikan, Zerbetz has spent a lifetime in observation and admiration of the ecology of Southeast Alaska. After a dive into the themes at the foundation of so much of her work, it’s unsurprising to learn she spends a considerable amount of time out on trail hiking, a keen witness to the unfolding of life.
“I do something called forest forensics, where I’ll see something (outside) and then try to figure out what’s happening,” she said. “That drove most of my early work — being out and then coming home and thinking to myself: ‘I have to know more about this. Like, why are sea urchins covering themselves with rocks?’ (…) Then, to then find out there’s an actual reason for different things made me want to illustrate them, so that’s how my artwork first started happening,” she said.
Talented across many mediums, her journey into printmaking was not immediate. A life-long creator, she was always doing some sort of painting, drawing, and fabric arts — at one point she even had a wind-sock factory of sorts in her living room. Her foray into printmaking didn’t begin until about the mid-80s when a friend of hers was teaching a class at the university that she joined in on. Immediately, she was hooked. After her undergraduate degree, however, exploration called out.
“There was a turning point for me where I was either going to travel or go back to school and get a degree in art, because that seemed to be all I was headed towards,” she said. “I picked travel and everywhere I went, I would go to an art university and take what I could as an outsider. That was very formative.”
In various boxes in her home are held small, hand-made treasures cataloguing these travels that she calls her journey books — beautifully hand-bound bound booklets in which she would memorialize her adventures through watercolors, drawings, anecdotes and observations. Flipping through the pages, memories spill out and come back to life as watercolors and still-life sketches bring energy back into old happenings.
“I would illustrate life: the first time you have to buy fruit in France or all the dogs everywhere over there, or getting stitches in Czechoslovakia,” she laughed, hovering on a page detailing an unexpected trip to the hospital. “This was purely a bread-and-cheese-and-art (trip over) 30 days in Europe.”
As it is within the strange workings of the world, these journey books are what actually led Zerbetz down the path of children’s book illustrations that had been a long-time goal for her. A book editor was so struck by the journey books on a visit to Zerbetz’s home that years after the fact, she reached back out when the publishing house wanted to get into children’s books. A match was made with writer Susan Ewing, the beginning of a relationship that has lasted a lifetime, and they began work on what eventually became Zerbetz’ first illustrated book: “Lucky Hares and Itchy Bears.”
Since then, Zerbetz has worked on the illustrations for a number of books with various writers, “Ten Rowdy Ravens,” “Little Red Snapperhood” and “Dream Flights on Arctic Nights” just to name a few. Looking through the linoleum cuts that went into the story “Little Narwhal Lost,” one is able to get an idea for the high standard she holds for herself through the numerous revisions and drafts she’s willing to do for each piece.
“I don’t think you can be scared of tedium if you’re a printmaker,” she said. “You have to actually sink into it and relish the act of repetition. I mean it’s like a mantra and I’m never afraid to redo something.”
Looking at two carved blocks of the same scene of a narwhal emerging through the surface of the water, we tried to find the differences between the drafts.
“I don’t know how many times I did this. I just couldn’t get it, it wasn’t moving me,” she said. “If there’s linework that I think is boring, I’ll just ditch it and start over. On this one I didn’t like the water, the water didn’t speak to the rest of the book for me. (…) A lot of the best writers are good editors or they have good editors, and being able to edit artwork I think is really part of what makes it good. Never be afraid to do it over if you think it can be (even a little bit) better.”
Currently, she’s in the preliminary stages of a new book. Working on the thumbnail size sketches of what will eventually be relief prints, the storyboard was splayed out playfully piece by piece on the floor — a story in its infancy waiting to bloom.
Beyond the 2-D
Not one to follow the status-quo, Zerbetz has made a name for herself across the country bringing the medium of relief printmaking far past its two-dimensional limitations.
“I started adding dimension to my cuts, and I was adding collage elements that I was sewing together to try to make things bigger. Next I wanted to print on wood and then (the next question I had was to see if I could make my lino cuts bend). I had a project that was spears and the linocuts bent around them,” she said.
One project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was a 18×52’’ linocut that eventually wrapped a 26-foot mobile science museum. The Watershed on Wheels was a science museum on wheels to educate people across multiple states about the Silvio O. Conte National Fish Wildlife Refuge. Another project, titled “We are Written in the Layers of the Earth,” is a 66-by-9-foot giant work in glass at the State Library, Archives, and Museum. For this, her linocuts were translated into hand-blown glass to make for a wall in between the state library and archives in Juneau.
“That’s been my drive through my whole career: How can I make my printmaking larger to work in public art situations and on alternative mediums?,” she said. “That’s been my main curiosity, and that’s what has driven a lot of my projects.”
A dancer, something she calls her secret life, many of her series take inspiration from movement. For one series titled “Exquisite Dancers,” Zerbets took hand-painted linocuts and mounted them to hand-printed and stitched papers that combined unrelated objects in such a way as to resemble a dancing body. For example, one dancer has a head of a flower, a tornado for a body, a spoon as an arm, a hand-fan for a skirt, and two feathers to make for legs and feet.
“They were based on the surrealist game called “Exquisite Corpse.” It was a thing the Surrealists did in the 1800s. Someone would draw a head, and then they pass it down, and someone would draw the body, then someone else would draw the legs,” she said. “So, to me, this is sort of playing the game on my own by combining things together.”
Star Gallery
Two years ago, Zerbetz added the title of gallery owner and skillset of curator to her repertoire with the opening of Star Gallery in downtown Ketchikan.
“I had shown with the Soho Coho Gallery that the Trolls had since they began — 31 years I showed with them,” she said. When that gallery closed down a few years ago, Zerbetz stepped up so that the community wouldn’t lose their local spot. “It has changed my life quite a bit.”
The gallery shows the work of over 30 artists, featuring a wonderfully curated selection of everything from prints and paintings to fishing-line baskets and local jewelry. There’s still a section that sells Ray Troll’s iconic work, a spot people jokingly refer to as the “Ray Troll store within the store,” but Zerbetz has also been able to install a feature wall that includes more local artists and rotating shows.
“Working with the artists has been a joy and it’s just been a different mission,” she said of the transition away from full-time creation. “I feel like I’ve had a lot of really fun, big projects and I’m not sure what else is in the lineup for that, but this has been its own curation and art form.”
Bringing to this role so much experience creating and selling work, her management of the gallery and love for the artists that show their work with her is remarkable. She regularly sends handwritten cards that she calls “love notes” to artists when they sell big pieces, wanting their experience to be personal and heartfelt.
Despite the hard work that goes into her role with Star Gallery, her time carving and printing is far from over. With one book in the docket and many other project ideas still bubbling up, there’s no doubt that Zerbetz will continue to find new ways to share her whimsical perspective of the world with us — one squeaky roll through her press at a time.
Learn more about Evon Zerbetz and see her prints on her website https://www.evonzerbetz.com/. This story is the seventh installation of “Pressing Silence,” a series of feature stories on traditional printmakers in Southeast Alaska. The series is made possible in part by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism’s Arts Reporting Grant.
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
