- [VO] Naval Air Station Whidbey Island is home to the new Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.

Open year round, this museum features a lovingly restored World War II Catalina and celebrates naval aviation through exhibits, tours, reenlistments and events.

Information at PNWNAM.org.

- I like kind of just being fully in my head.

It's just like pure memory.

And that's more what I'm going for with my paintings.

Trying to replicate the energy or the momentum of that place.

(piano theme music) - [VO] The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community is easy to spot thanks to three distinctive pavilions in the shape of woven cedar hats.

Standing along the Swinomish Channel in Swadabs Park, the hats mark the site of an ancestral village and now serve as a place of community gathering and canoe journeys.

At the entrance of the park stand two story poles adorned with swimming salmon.

Swinomish master carver, Kevin Paul, created the poles with the help of apprentice and son-in-law, Camas Logue.

Logue's Indigenous heritage is rooted further south.

An enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon, he moved to Swinomish in 2020 to the homeland of his wife, singer-songwriter, Katherine Paul.

In his adopted Skagit Valley home, Logue finds artistic inspiration in the lush landscape, shifting skies and surrounding waters.

- [Camas] This is like a little strip that goes out to the tip of the Swinomish channel here.

A big part of my practice is being outside and exploring different places, but in particular, this is one of my favorite.

- So this place is called “hole in the wall,” and why is that?

- Because there's a little hole in a very big wall.

(laughs) - It makes sense.

- Yeah.

It's also called S'i'ud', which is the Lushootseed word which means “a very narrow place.” - Mmm.

- I just really like how the landscape changes.

You're going from, like, an industrial boatyard up into a cedar forest, and then you're overlooking the islands and the water.

- You spent a lot of time in nature growing up.

Do you remember when you first started connecting nature to art?

- Yeah, so I started painting when I was pretty young with my grandma, and she was an abstract painter.

She did a lot of like, symbolism.

That's kind of like where my first love of painting started was with her.

- Did you have a sense of that was something you wanted to do as a grown up?

- Yeah, I did.

I always told my grandma when I was little that I was like, “I'm going to be an artist, a doctor, and the Pope.” - [VO] Logue's foray into landscape painting began in Portland, where he was born and based for many years.

He started small with an exploration in tiny etchings thanks to a gift of musical materials.

- I had a friend who ran this piano company in Portland called the Immortal Piano Company.

(laughs) - Love it.

- And she would refurbish old pianos, and there was often, like these old ivory keys that she had to replace, so she'd pry off the ivory.

I was really obsessed with scrimshaw, so I started etching the landscapes on these little piano keys, and when I would bring them back, I would take that image and then transfer it onto a canvas, and that's... that totally transformed how I was painting and the style I was painting.

Now it's neither abstract nor landscape.

It's more the energy of the location.

Collecting all the little patterns that I find in my memory, and then go back to transfer that.

- [VO] Logue's garage serves as his home studio, where he works on projects including basket weaving and carving.

He's also a musician, playing drums and guitar in Black Belt Eagle Scout.

Fronted by his wife Katherine, the band makes music that reflects an intuitive sense of place, not unlike Logue's paintings.

Just as each track of a song builds depth and resonance, Logue uses a process of layering to bring his remembered places to life.

- So this is the middle of the layering process that I'm doing, and then this background area right here is the island that we were looking at earlier today that was kind of emerging from the fog, like it looks like it's doing right now.

- It does.

It really does.

But I don't remember seeing any of this.

Where did that come from?

- This is just in my mind.

I'm really interested in the properties of paint in itself, so energetically, what paint can do that can mimic different things in nature.

So if I'm looking at that little island in the background, like maybe that's more like a physical place, but then what's going on in the front-ground is me experimenting with the paint and seeing sort of how it can reflect nature, how it can reflect geography, and how things move and erode.

Sometimes it's a memory, sometimes it's a motion.

Like when you're walking through the woods, you're swinging your arms, and it applies with the paint in the same way where it's just this fluid, gestural motion.

All paint is a pigment, a natural pigment.

A lot of it comes from somewhere on the earth, and it's almost like soil or sediment.

- [VO] In 2022, Logue delved literally into his ancestral lands, excavating natural pigments from Oregon earth and beaches.

Called the “Klamath Land Pigment Series,” the resulting paintings feature purple from elderberry, black from ash, and green from nettles.

Also in the mix is a vibrant blue compound called vivianite, which he's now using to color a series of lithographs.

- So vivianite's really cool pigment.

In particular, this vivianite right here, which I really love.

Here, you're welcome to hold it.

This is a petrified spruce cone from the Oregon coast that was buried under a tsunami a long, long time ago.

It's a really special pigment because it's blue and it's a harder pigment to find.

So I'm going to grab these two, and I'm going to put them in our mortar and pestle.

And I want to just get it as fine as possible.

- Yeah, you can already see the different blues emerging.

- [VO] When using natural pigments, Logue makes his connection with the land literal.

Toward the end of his painting process, Logue returns to the skills he once plied on piano keys, this time using graphite to scratch tiny lines across the landscape.

Highlighting and defining layers both geologic and poetic, as if to etch the memory in his mind.

- And this came into your work as a result of the scrimshaw you were doing?

- Yeah, so I'm kind of capturing that aesthetic and then also trying to pull out patterns and shadows that I see in the paint and move things around.

I really like the meticulousness of doing this.

It's just like a little, like slow and fun process.

(pencil scratching on paper) That you can kind of get lost in.

The literal erosion of the land is a big inspiration of what I'm trying to do with the paint.

It's witnessing the way that the earth moves and the way that the landscape changes.

- [VO] Abstract and intuitive, Logue's paintings represent not just a place but geological time.

Pulling us backward into ancestral history and forward into the future of local lands.

- [VO] This series was made possible in part with the generous support of Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.