Former Lecturer Tom Killion: Carving the Song of the Coast

PACIFIC SUN -- Some artists’ work is immediately recognizable—“That must be a Picasso” or, “That’s Dali,” or “Look—a Banksy.” Marin woodcut artist Tom Killion would reject such comparisons with a self-deprecating laugh, but for many, he is one such artist—you know a Killion when you see it. And with a big and beautiful new book out showcasing much of his best work, we can now see a lot more. “At SF State I taught in the late 1990s classes on California and San Francisco history and culture. And I got some of my ideas about poems from teaching, and went off on two particular tangents that are in this book—Jaime de Angulo and J. Smeaton Chase, as well as the original journals of Juan Crespi, which were just translated and published in the early 2000s. Everybody knew about the Portola expedition through the rewritten and redacted older versions, with lots of interesting stuff cut out, such as their first encounters with coastal Native Americans.”