All prints are handmade by Peter Ralston on archival rag paper with an archival ink set.

Small Matted Prints - This collection is printed on 8.5 x 11 inch sheets, matted, ready for you to frame. Priced at $135.

New Work Edition - This open edition of 17 x 22 inch prints is priced at $500.

The Master Prints - This limited edition print is limited to 50 prints of this image plus 10 artist proofs (AP). They are printed on 24 x 36 inch sheets and are priced starting at $2000.

Custom sizes of this image are available by special request.

The story behind….Bardo

Last summer I was out on Raven with an old friend and his son, just poking around and seeing what we could see. We pulled up to the town float on Isle au Haut, walked up the wharf and immediately beheld a cluster of skiffs tied, belly-up, to a handsome old apple tree.

It was a compelling scene and the three of us all felt our shutter fingers twitching; the skiffs, the background filled with lobsterboats and another island….surely there was an image to be made here.

But I, for one, couldn’t see it. Not at all. And try as they might, neither could my crew. I suggested that perhaps we were all trying too hard…we needed to relax and just try – as I always do – to simply be open and let the image(s) find us.

And then it happened. I looked down at the oldest of the skiffs and saw that somebody had semi-successfully scraped the battered old bottom to clean it of accumulated marine growth. I looked a little more closely and sank to my knees until my nose was just inches from the bottom and then it happened.

I beheld a constellation of fantastic forms, shapes and colors…none of it made “sense” in any conventional manner, it was simply exquisite…an abstract world unto itself. There were no trees, skiffs, boats, islands; I was transported to an altogether different plane, one beyond imagination, one that demanded no understanding.

Anyway, I made a few exposures through my closeup lens and that was it. What you see is only about four inches of the rough bottom of a beat-up old skiff, but to me it was a look through a door of otherworld perception.

I have to admit that I quite like this image, but I started fretting about a title. You see, Andy and Betsy Wyeth long ago instilled in me an abiding respect for the critical importance of titling work. So, I fretted and stewed about this one; I came up with a few titles that, in the rear-view mirror, were dutifully earnest but actually terrible.

I was trying too hard.

And then, as images and stories tend to do when I am somehow fully open, the title found me.

A couple of weeks after I made this image, I was again out on Raven for a long day on the bay. Upon returning I immediately learned that a very good friend, the owner of the wonderful coffee-shop across the street from the gallery, had accidentally severed the tibial artery in his right ankle and very nearly bled to death. The shop’s quick-thinking chef heard a commotion and rushed our friend to the nearby hospital to which my near-death friend’s wife instantly raced.

As she was relating all of this to me the next day, she allowed that as she hovered at his side while the doctors tried to save his life, he was ghostly pale and preternaturally calm. Twice she used the word bardo. Standing together here in the gallery while she related the saga, I looked down at a table on which this ethereal image was lying and knew that, once again, the absolutely perfect title had found me.

In Buddhism, bardo is an “intermediate, transitional or liminal state between death and rebirth.” I encourage you to look it up.

My friend was there…and I am very glad that he’s back. Thank you Jacob, Sean and Madrona…thank you.