PORT ANGELES — After decades of working as a clinical psychologist, Olympic Peninsula resident Kate Loveland now sees the world through new eyes, almost like switching lenses on a camera.
The 80-year-old Loveland says she dabbled in both photography and writing for some years, but truly embraced the arts when she and her husband Jim retired in 2010.
Now she finds subjects of inspiration while at sea or on a hike, discovering beautiful patterns in the natural world.
“The opportunities are endless,” she says from her Port Angeles home on bluffs not far from the mouth of the Elwha River.
And while it’s not as easy to get around in her eighth decade, Loveland says creativity in all its forms fuels her, as it can others.
“Creativity is gravitating toward things that excite or interests me,” she says, be it playing music or taking a picture or writing prose or poetry. “People say, ‘I can’t do that,’ but … it could be anything, as long as it excites you.”
Research, she notes, shows a definite relationship doing things one is passionate about and one’s longevity.
You are to a large extent how you spend your time, she says, so why not spend it learning or doing something that excites you?
“‘These passions are what keeps life exciting,” she says.
Loveland, who for years had an office on West Bell Street in Sequim, says she started developing a passion for photography on sailing trips. She and Jim would pull into port and she’d go off on a hike, finding patterns and textures in images of a tree’s leaves or bark, or a pelt of moss.
Sometimes, if it suits, she’ll take a small piece of nature and bring it back to her “studio”— the couple’s laundry room — for closer images using a macro lens. Often after toying with the image’s coloring, she’ll frame the subject, and enjoy the viewing vicariously.
“What really excites me is people reacting different ways [to the image],” Loveland says.
“I don’t sell a lot of work,” she says, but she finds people spend a good amount of time studying her pieces.
“I’m happy that it arrests their attention.”
Loveland’ll have a chance to do as much locally when she brings her work — featured in her “Shadows of Reality” exhibit at Gallery 110 in Seattle in October — to the Blue Whole Gallery in Sequim for display this November. Her work will be featured alongside ceramic artist Mike Middlestead.
Not confining herself to one artist expression, Loveland says she’s started writing as well. She’s working on a book set in the Coast Salish world, drawing on her background in psychology (there are Greek mythology and Jungian themes) and Pacific Northwest wildlife (she got her undergraduate degree in biology). The protagonist is a woman who grows to have a sharper sense of self.
“It gives me such joy to research each of these areas,” she says.
A key aspect of her growth as a writer, she says, came when she joined a writing club about 10 years ago. A collaborative union of about seven, the members offer writings — and critiques — of poetry and prose to magazine article-style pieces and more.
“I had never been a writer,” Loveland recalls. “It’s just a joy to learn from these women.”
And she’s learning from the passage of time, too. Loveland says that, in her 80s, she can’t hike as fast as she once did.
“When I hike, I move slowly. I’ll sit on a log and rest. That is such a gift. I find something I would have missed if I were hiking faster.”
Simply put, slowing down has allowed for growth, something the burgeoning author put in her own words.
“At 80,” Loveland writes, “it’s easier to follow a path with a gradual, not steep, incline. In other words, I don’t need to hurry when I photograph nature or find the best phrase for my story.”
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Michael Dashiell is the editor of the Sequim Gazette of the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which also is composed of other Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News and Forks Forum. Reach him at editor@sequimgazette.com.
