“I have an idea to walk and see doomed boats,” my email read. Tangible enough to imagine, mysterious enough to be alluring — this seemed as good a place to meet as any and too on-brand coming from a Sitkan to question. Doomed boats at sunset were awaiting, doomed boats at sunset it would be.
Standing just outside of Pioneer Bar, then, just downwind from ANB Harbor, Rebecca Poulson cruised up next to me on her bicycle. As the sound of her gears clicking got louder, I noticed some waterproof bike bags strapped along the back tire. Wondering aloud if she was a bike packer, she laughed in response, “No, this is just my two-wheeled version of a station wagon.”
Steps along Katlian Street towards Thomsen Harbor brought us past the only remaining Tlingit clan houses in town, and the since-developed sites where more once stood. We halted in silence alongside the ruins of one such collapsed house — the next day Poulson would show me a wood engraving she made of that same house while it was still standing. Poulson uses local landmarks like the dogeared pages of a book about her hometown — stories of Sitka’s history and intertwining characters written into everything she sees.
Having arrived at Thomsen, the doomed boats greeted her like old friends. Poulson walked me through her past life as a shipwright specializing in wooden boats to the tune of eagles chittering into the February air. The harbor’s clear water gave view to some impressively sized anemones enjoying their home on these abandoned hulls.
“The wooden boats are so beautiful — just the curves and the lines,” she said. “There’s a real satisfaction in making something that you’re proud of that is just really beautiful, even if it doesn’t have to be.”
A commercial fisherman at one point, she noticed one of the boats to be a rig she had once worked on. A moment of silence between her and the boat: perhaps the last meeting between two friends.
Having gone to boat building school in England, she spent many years under the hulls of wooden boats making repairs. Drawn in by the tactile, serious nature of the trade she eventually started the Sitka Shipwrights Cooperative with some other shipwrights in town. All these years later, she had no problem describing the process she would undergo in replacing a plank. For example, hearing cha-chunk versus cha-chink from the mallet while caulking a boat’s seams was the difference between a firm hull and otherwise.
“It’s just that feeling that it’s real — you know?,” she said of that work and her time fishing. “It’s something where people’s lives depend on what you’re doing. (…) It’s not artificial, it’s just very direct.”
Many of those same friends from the cooperative ended up alongside her at the Maritime Heritage Society as well, using their handiwork to transform the Japonski Boat House (which had fallen into serious disrepair) into an active boat repair shop and center for maritime heritage and education. Loving tradition, craft and history as she does, it comes as no surprise to see how printmaking fits into all of the above. Poulson’s life is an incredible weave of water, craftsmanship and history — a tapestry threaded into every aspect of her life, art practice included.
Professor DeArmond
Throughout her childhood in Sitka, Poulson was always artistic but in hindsight admits she didn’t get an introduction to the type of art she was craving.
“When I was a kid, I used to draw all the time,” she said. “It always seemed like you just never really experienced art in Sitka — you would think of art as, you know, pictures of sea otters. It seemed like it was all stuff to sell to the tourists.”
Curious nonetheless about making things, and certainly drawn to wood craftsmanship because of her experience building boats, as fate would have it there would be a natural segue into the serious arts heading her way in the form of iconic Southeast Alaskan printmaker Dale DeArmond. DeArmond retired to Sitka in the 90s, moving into the Sitka Pioneer Home after a career in Juneau as the director of the Juneau city library. (An explanation as to why Juneau Public Library has such a meticulously curated printmaking section).
“They [DeArmond and her husband, Bob] were family friends of my parents and were at Thanksgiving (one year),” Poulson said, about 30 years old at the time. “I asked Dale if she could show me how to do wood engraving. She was doing a class for employees of the Pioneer Home in the basement where she had her press set up. (…) By that time, there weren’t so many Pioneer Home people, but it was just different people kind of cycling through, and on Saturdays we’d all sit there and gossip and Dale would always have a new block going every week. She was just incredibly productive.”
Looking around Poulson’s studio now speaks to the relationship she had with the DeArmonds, both Dale and Bob. Dale’s original blocks can easily be found around the studio, tucked beneath Eric Bealer prints and alongside cans of ink. Bob, a historian himself, continues to inform Poulson’s work as she uses his work in preparation to write a book on the history of Sheldon Jackson high school and college — one of her many projects investigating history.
Those weekends at the Pioneer home were foundational not only to her technical art practice as a wood engraver, but to her art philosophy as well.
“I think there’s not a lot of people who are true artists, and because she never relied on sales of her work and because she worked as a librarian her whole career, she was really free to experiment and just try whatever,” Poulson said of DeArmond. One of her biggest takeaways from this relationship, and one that has influenced her own art practice and teaching philosophy: “The only way to do art is because you’re curious — because you want to see what’s going to happen.”
Wood Engraving: Painting with Light
There are many different types of printmaking, but for relief printmakers wood engraving often takes the cake as the most respected technique. A type of relief printmaking, wood engravers use end-grain hardwood (Poulson often uses maple) to achieve extremely detailed, intricate pieces.
“The nature of it being very graphic allows for very interesting stuff to go on with the shapes and composition,” she said, likening wood engraving to drawing with light. “I’m just really interested in the world, in trees, in textures and everything like that. Wood engraving is amazing for that.”
If there was ever an artist that mastered this idea of drawing with light, it’s Poulson. Her pieces have a gravity to them, less stamped images and more landscapes and scenes that quite literally pull you into the piece. She utilizes high-level landscape techniques within her prints to play with perspective and point of view. Much of her work captures aspects of life in Sitka so intimate they feel like glimpses into old home videos — Sunday Afternoon and Musicians are just two such examples of work that is almost documentary in nature.
For Poulson, some of the thrill of this technique is in its finality. Renowned for her annual Outer Coast Wall Calendars, she draws a connection between her work as a painter and printmaker – artforms often featured alongside one another in each year’s calendar.
“A lot of wood engravers are watercolor painters, too,” she said. “I think it’s because with wood engraving and watercolor, you can’t go back. There’s this thing where you have to be kind of in the moment and just play with that edge.”
She credits a lot of her practice to the time she spent with DeArmond, and much of her art theory and history to her printmaking master’s degree program from Tyler School of Art. However, it was in working with her children, and going into their classrooms and others as an artist in the schools that she feels she finally rounded out her arts education. In working with children, studying how to best teach them art, and observing master teachers in kindergarten and the Fine Arts Camp, she says she began to see what art could really do.
“Art is sort of another language, or a way of communicating that isn’t literal,” she said. “It’s not the way of thinking that we’re accustomed to or familiar with, and that goes for poetry as well — it’s just a different way of sharing meaning and communicating and little children have access to that.”
She’s spent time teaching in elementary classrooms, at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, and with adults as well.
“I feel like the way art needs to be taught is that there’s no wrong answer,” she said. “Then, kids can just achieve so much more than they could have dreamed of because of these supports.”
Studio with Soul
Like many other things in Poulson’s life, her studio is interwoven into the larger tapestry of water, craftsmanship and history that she unconsciously spins at all times. A half-empty wine bottle and various snacks adorned a desk in the back of the studio where her brother, James Poulson, has been hosting a life drawing group. Stacks of books written by Poulson titled “A Short History of Sitka, Alaska” for the Maritime Heritage Society are in boxes next to old iterations of Outer Coast calendars, a tradition that started in 1995 entirely illustrated with wood engravings of, you guessed it, boats. Next door is The Sitka Sentinel, Sitka’s daily newspaper run by her parents and James.
After a morning spent wrestling with data fields for new software for The Sentinel, she brushed off the snow accumulated from her bike ride and began wrestling instead with an ancient-looking heater. Light poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a portal into the falling snow and the town that makes for so much of Poulson’s inspiration.
The studio is strewn with issues of The Sentinel from the 90s and early 2000s that Poulson uses as blankets on her proof press to achieve the right pressure on her blocks while printing. The walls are a comically accurate representation of Poulson’s life and values: original Dale DeArmond blocks on a shelf next to yellowing newspapers; original Eric Bealer prints half-way hidden behind children’s paintings; a book titled “Merchant Vessels of the United States 1952” used to weigh down a bag of dampened paper.
All things in her life connected, the 1920s No. 1 Vandercook Proof Press she was using actually originally came from Sheldon Jackson — the focus of her upcoming book.
“The (Sitka Sound) Science Center was (originally Sheldon Jackson’s) industrial arts building, and they had a print shop,” she said. “Someone came to be their vocational arts person but then they closed the high school and ended the vocational programs. When they closed the high school (…) he saved the press. His house was full of collections from his and his wife’s work and it took us a while to get it out because it was a snowy winter. I swear just a few weeks later (after retrieving the press), his house burned down.”
A jack of all trades, most of her time lately has been spent on an impressive slate of projects blending together her experiences across the board in art, history and oceangoing. New interpretive signs are soon to go up on Sitka’s waterfront, a project to digitize and share photographs of fishing culture from the 1980s is in swing, time is being spent promoting the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society’s walking tours, and, of course, she’s curating poetry and her own prints and watercolors for the 2027 Outer Coast Calendar. This isn’t even to mention the set she’s building for “Much Ado About Nothing” nor the work going into the history book she’s writing (or the other one she already released).
Next to that No.1 Vandercook Proof Press sits DeArmond’s etching press. Thinking of the prints pulled from that press, and seeing those that still give it life today, is enough to imagine a great destiny of future work from the press.
A historian, an artist, a writer, a shipwright, but above all else a Sitkan, so much of Poulson’s work is at the intersecting nodes of all of these different parts of her identity. Few and far between are the people that could look at a sinking, rotten, abandoned wooden boat and find the interwoven story of art, history and culture sitting dormant between the planks. Fewer are those that would find it worthy of sharing, much less dedicate themselves so earnestly to opening up that history.
As in her art practice as in her life, Poulson is such a person: one able to breathe new life into the hidden stories that make up the world around us, doomed boats and all.
Learn more about Rebecca Poulson and see her prints on her website theoutercoast.com. This story is the third 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.
