Although Isla Negra is not really an island, it is indeed an oasis of ideas, humor and humanity concentrated within a rambling wooden house poised above a restless ocean. I had visited Pablo Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, Chile several times, feeling at ease by the littoral that is a mirror image of California’s rugged shoreline.

After one such trip, in 1999, I imagined paintings that might summon up those memories fresh in mind — of the wooden figureheads, some with doleful glass eyes, staring out to sea, from his living room window. In my Santa Barbara studio, I saturated sheets of a fibrous Japanese paper with puddles of bluish-gray pigment. Latent shapes emerged from these little seas of color and I used paint and strands of tapa cloth to suggest elements of human form, in this way recalling both the ship’s figureheads I’d sketched while in Chile and the blue shores of the Pacific.

The same sea that was a constant presence to Pablo Neruda also brought about my Isla Negra series. I wanted to couple these paintings with poems that Neruda had written about the sea. Alastair Reid made the connection between the two, by guiding me through volumes of poems, many that I had never seen before, and steering me towards those “with meat on their bones”. He agreed to let me use his translations for the original limited edition of fifty books that I made with handmade linen paper, poetry printed letterpress with full sized prints of the paintings. The title, On the Blue Shore of Silence, came from the poem Forget About Me.