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 think a lot about elements that connect people.

Clouds or wind or water.

A lot of it is observing this world that's moving and swirling and crossing oceans, and doesn't know anything about borders at all.

So things that are part of this natural landscape, that are where I live, but also connecting me to other communities across the ocean or down the coast or up the river.

And that sort of the subjects that I'm, that I'm thinking about.

In Astoria, Oregon, the houses are stacked into a hillside overlooking the mouth of the Columbia River.

Gated by the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the small coastal city is awash in maritime history, revealed in its shipwrecks and fishermen poets.

In 1805, Lewis and Clark ended their westward journey just south of here, surviving a winter, thanks in large part to help from the Clatsop tribe.

The port was settled in 1811, and from the towering Astoria Column, it's clear that the city is nearly an island surrounded by water on three sides.

The currents and winds blowing in from the west have determined its character for centuries.

Native Hawaiian artist and educator Miki'ala Souza is fluent in Pacific weather and water patterns, having grown up in Honolulu.

Now based in Astoria, Souza stays rooted in the environment, making landscapes of wind and water in her home studio overlooking Youngs Bay.

So what you're going to be showing me today is monotype... plus a little — your own twist on monotypes.

Is that correct?

- Yes.

I'll show you down here.

So I have a lot of thicker, heavier papers that I've printed on several layers.

Some of them are in various stages of adding collage work onto it.

- But everything in here you would consider kind of a background for something that's yet to come.

Is that right?

- Yeah.

So these are all sort of starting points or in progress.

And sometimes I'll hang on to these for years before they sort of have their moment.

Souza left Hawaii to study painting at the University of Oregon, but after moving to Astoria and meeting a printmaker mentor, she shifted her focus to monotypes.

Considered the most painterly style of printmaking, the process creates a single, unique image.

Souza enjoys the unpredictable nature of these prints, the chaos and happy surprises.

Do you have something in your mind that is a specific landscape, or weather or memory or... I think as I start to build up layers, I start to think of how just visually, how you can sort of move across your paper.

I'm sort of thinking about composition a little bit, and just how we can pull our eye through the texture and the color and the ink, and it's just creating movements.

And things slowly start to become atmospheric and fluid and build motion.

She starts by prepping the printer's ink... and rolling it out onto a plexiglass surface.

Color is key to Souza's work, whether bright orange recalling Hawaii flowers or moody blue grays suggesting Astoria in a storm.

Sometimes she removes ink with rags or stencils as she imagines the movement and flow of the print.

So I kind of just remove some of this.

- Oh, all that hard work, rolling it out!

- I know, but I don't need all this red.

A little goes a long way.

And... sometimes just making sort of these horizontal motions, sometimes I will put sort of string or raffia or different sort of materials in there.

While building her layered landscape on heavy cotton paper, Souza runs the inked surface through the press multiple times.

Smoogie.

And so that'll be the first layer, and I'll build up on top of that.

Souza is interested in layers of place, the historical records, environmental changes and political shifts that pile up in one location.

Using a process called collage relief, she adds pieces of previously printed, stenciled or cut paper to reflect this idea, with layers of pattern and texture.

Sometimes an underlayer gets completely covered by a new addition, but it lies beneath, adding to the origin story.

When you're making these clouds, do you think of them as Hawaii clouds or Astoria?

That's such a good question.

I really like the idea of its not being any specific place.

People will say, “Oh, that looks like where I grew up in the Bay area,” or “Oh, that looks like the colors of the skies around here in the wintertime.” And it's all their own experience.

Souza presses the collaged piece once more to meld the layers into the background.

And everything's nice and flat.

- It stayed!

-Yep.

The direction Souza finds herself returning to is West, across the ocean toward her Hawaiian family and ancestors.

Inspired by her artists parents, she's also influenced by a decorative Native Hawaiian textile tradition that originated as early as 300 A.D.

The compositions that I have been making a lot with these clouds, they're inspired by traditional kapa, which is bark cloth.

And so there was a lot of geometric and sort of movement throughout those pieces, and I find that really inspiring, how they kind of just break up those spaces.

Seeing these as prints and thinking about, you know, my ancestors and my culture as being printmakers and creating these images, it's a nice way to feel connected to where you come from.

At nearby Fort Stevens, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Columbia River, Souza is reminded of the way water currents connect people across great expanses.

The interpersonal impact might be subconscious or felt as deeply as homesickness.

Growing up in Hawaii, were you connecting with your native Hawaiian heritage through art?

- As someone who is Hawaiian, I was raised understanding, you know, my place in the universe and the world, and how you see nature and how you exist within it and a part of it.

If we take care of it, it will take care of us.

And the relationship is really significant between us and nature.

In what ways has living here in Astoria changed the way you make art?

This is really where I started printmaking.

One of the things that helped me appreciate the environment that I live in is, is the printmaking being able to create color and the way that the landscapes just sort of emerge in the artwork has made me much more interested in the landscape around me.

As an artist, Souza taps into deep impressions left by the past, evoking both the physical movement of water and the figurative winds of change.

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