What I love about Eva Isaksen's new works from 2009 is both their larger scale and the artist's ramped up use of drawing with ink. One can see an artist's mood and read their aim or aimless mind in a line. Like palm reading. And these particular lines - that depict circles, cones, fans, pods, and other abstract flora-type images - are as rough and warm as dry point etching. What is different about this latest body of work, says Isaksen, is that ". . .more drawing is coming into it. Something is going to happen from here on and I don't know what it's going to be. They're very organic but also very secretive." One needs to spend time before these works but it is worth it. Plum-blue, sky blue, ultramarine and inky-blues layer with oranges, grays, yellows and purples to shape blender blade flowers, childlike marigolds, yarn balls, spider webs, lifting stems, scalloped circus tent edges, lantern fruit husks, and Bucky Fuller geodesic domes. Orbs are cut into pies and filled with seeds while the artist's confident yet surprised line keeps the drawing from becoming precious in these works that sing about process. Isakesn's paper-on-canvas pieces may be too beautiful. Like a speech without a few jokes, beauty with nothing ugly feels incongruent with life. But that could just be me. When it comes to visual art I often pine for trailing-on-the-floor, end-of-world, non-rectangular, non-above-the-couch-able, risk ruining it stuff. Which is totally impractical. My favorite past works of Isaksen's are those made with barely any color. Her deep gray and white pieces are handsome and mysterious, plus they feel gender-free (as Virginia Woolf might say). To me they have power, causing me to trust where the artist is leading me. I would love to see them made giant - as cut shapes along a wall or on ten-foot square canvases where, say, Cy Twombly meets early Frank Stella. Color often distracts like a pretty girl veering Isaksen's works close to the edge of decorative. In her statement she writes that her work is inspired by nature and that she prints on paper using pressed plants and other organic material. What texture this does create in Isaksen's art is important because it makes the work physical and grounds it in this world. Otherwise her compositions feel like psychic, emotional and/or intellectual landscapes that could drift away into solitude. But why glue and flatten paper that is so naturally free, ragged and beautiful into obedience? Go to Isaksen's web site - www.evaisaksen.com - and you will find an image of her in her studio where the papers she is working with fly and cascade down a wall. The light moves through them, various sheets layered down the wall resemble a frothing waterfall. These papers are a part of the world, not for only eyes but also to rustle in breeze, to age and air. To silence something that free seems a pity. Molly Norris . . . Molly is an artist and an arts writer living in Seattle, Washington. Eva Isaksen's exhibit, "Transitions," is on view Tuesday to Saturday from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. October 1st through October 24th at the Foster/White Gallery located 220 Third Avenue South in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. There is a reception for the artist on October 1st, from 6 to 8 P.M. in conjunction with the First Thursday Art Walk. For more information, please call (206) 622-2833, email seattle@fosterwhite.com or visit the website www.fosterwhite.com.

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