One Year, 12 Books: Katy Gilmore's Year at Bloedel Reserve

Blue & White & Summer VII

After nearly 50 years in Alaska, artist Katy Gilmore is delighted to be living in the Pacific Northwest, with year-round access to a green world. Her work—including large watercolors, smaller pen-and-watercolor pieces, and artists’ books—has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions.

Gilmore works primarily in watercolor, drawn to its transparent immediacy and its ability to capture the delicate qualities of a flower petal. She also appreciates watercolor’s long history in nature studies and garden journals. Much of her work takes the form of a series: meadow flowers observed throughout the months of summer, changes in weather and bloom documented over time in artists’ books, or a summer’s blossoms depicted in the same blue-and-white vase.

July 2024 Meadow; watercolor on paper

Changes in the natural world are a central focus of Gilmore’s work. While living in Alaska, she wrote and illustrated The Year in Flowers: A Daybook, published by Alaska Northwest Books. Her first artists’ book, Two Weeks Past the Equinox, traced the gradual arrival of winter. Most recently, she explored the Japanese concept of dividing the year into 72 micro-seasons, using five-day increments to closely observe her surroundings and record what she discovered on the pages of old gardening encyclopedias.

As a Community Creative at Bloedel Reserve, Gilmore has embraced the opportunity to spend time walking through the Reserve, observing and making notes. She finds that the act of paying close attention brings a particular kind of focus—one that allows experiences in the landscape to be transformed into words and images.

Bloedel Reserve July monoprint

She is currently creating a record of her year at Bloedel: an artists’ book for each month. To illustrate the books, she is exploring a new medium—a simple form of monoprinting. The resulting soft, fuzzy images seemed particularly well suited to suggesting the complexity of the Bloedel landscape and the way it continually changes throughout the year.

Still, Gilmore cannot stay away from watercolor. Alongside the monthly books, she is creating small paintings of individual flowers as they bloom at Bloedel—a kind of mini flora documenting the Reserve one flower at a time.

Gilmore’s work can be found at Bainbridge Arts & Crafts in Winslow and on her website, katygilmore.com. She can also be found on Instagram at @gilmorekaty.