Jeremy Gartland

Interview with Katie Bonadies, July 2025

Pictured: Jeremy Gartland. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Jeremy Gartland is a photographer who is getting into linocut printmaking and hand-tool woodworking. He has been at RWS for about a year. He splits his time between Portland, where he grew up, and the Boston area where he has been working in the emergency medical field for the past two decades. Jeremy was a paramedic in Cambridge, MA for twelve years before working his current job as a physician assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital in the emergency department where he’s been for the past eight years. “It’s one of the biggest hospitals and it was a crazy opportunity to work there. It’s an epicenter of the most difficult cases all over New England; people get flown in. There, you see cases of appendicitis but it’s appendicitis and a rare cancer that only one person in the world can treat.” 

A study found that people in Jeremy’s position experience workflow interruption once a minute every minute. This includes alarms going off in his department. He works twelve-hour shifts and learns something new every shift, despite the interruptions. The work is very regulated and protocol driven. Jeremy says it’s his ADD-induced adaptability that allows him to thrive in this environment. He is constantly reprioritizing at work, which is why he enjoys coming to the studios because he can just throw on his headphones and make prints. “It’s important to carve out a small moment to feel like a human again and take a minute to see the person in front of me as a human being and less like a patient or a task.”

Every day at 3 p.m. during the pandemic, Jeremy would see a huge influx of people come into the emergency department. They were service workers coming off of their shift. He was heartbroken by the disparity between these individuals and everyone else hunkered down at home. His therapist told him, 

Pictured: photograph by Jeremy Gartland.

'We are all in the same storm, and we are all in very different boats.' The idea that everybody has a different experience and perspective spoke to Jeremy, “I thought if I can take pictures and try to give someone else a glimpse of my experience and try to experience other people's perspective through art, that’s a really amazing way for people to feel connected.”

Making art is a welcome relief from the excitement of Jeremy’s job. Jeremy can hyper focus and there are afternoons where he is in the studios for six hours without stopping. It’s a more solitary experience and there are no rules, which was intimidating for Jeremy at first because it is a completely opposite experience from the chaos of his job. He appreciates printmaking because it feels so different from the rest of his life. All of his education had been focused on medicine and science, and he was immediately taken when he took his first art class. It was a black and white film photography class, which he found challenging and fun. (He didn’t realize he was supposed to know how to use the camera before he got there.) He later took a digital photography class and a class with his niece. “I wish I knew this before, I would have done this a long time ago.”

Jeremy started by taking pictures of a different flower every day to be reminded of the beauty in the natural world. Going out and taking photos forces Jeremy to slow down and appreciate the moment. Taking pictures also makes Jeremy want to see things from a different perspective. His favorite photo he’s ever taken happened when he was walking through the graffiti park in Boston back to his car. As he passed a construction site, he saw a flower through a building and snapped a quick picture. He likes the forced perspective and that it allows others to access a moment from his internal experience. “Art gives you a chance to see someone’s thought process in your own head.” 

Pictured: print by Jeremy Gartland.

Pictured: print by Jeremy Gartland.

Jeremy still focuses on flowers but has expanded his photography practice to include landscapes and the ocean. He likes to go to Two Lights and photograph the rocks and waves. He says he could do it for fifty years and still not be satisfied. “When I initially started taking pictures of flowers, I just wanted to share something on Instagram that I knew everyone would see and hopefully add a ray of sunshine to their day.” When he’s walking to work and he sees a flower he stops to appreciate the beauty and takes a breath. He also thinks flowers are cool from a botany perspective and is amazed at how varied they can be.

He got into printmaking when he moved home three years ago. He wanted to make prints of the flowers he had photographed and quickly realized that printmaking is hard. Jeremy found it hard to find subjects he felt he could capture well in print. He thought of how Hunter S. Thompson famously typed classics like The Great Gatsby because he said he wanted to know what it was like to write a masterpiece. Jeremy applied this same idea to printmaking and set out to make a print of a Japanese wave woodblock, to get a feel for how it works. “There’s something about those woodblock prints that are simple and look easy. It’s just a couple of lines and a wave but is incredibly difficult to replicate.” Imitation allowed Jeremy to appreciate the work that went into making those prints. His favorite part of the process is sharpening the tools and the beauty of a smoothly cut line.

Pictured: photograph by Jeremy Gartland.

He feels selfish taking pictures and making prints because he it's just to develop the muscle that went untouched for most of his life. “I want to make something beautiful that will make someone stop and take a minute to look and think about a perspective that maybe they didn’t think about before.” It’s really hard for Jeremy to feel finished or satisfied with something he makes, but he’s learned to not let perfection be the enemy of good. He has learned to be gentler with himself and uses a light touch when he edits his photos as a reminder to be happy with the moment he captured rather than try to make it better. It’s a reminder that learning something along the way is worthy of his time and worthy in and of itself. 

Follow Jeremy’s Instagram accounts @itsjameallthewaydown for his photography and @thesearethedogsivemet for pictures of the cute dogs he meets.