Alaska has a way of touching a person’s soul—of getting into one’s blood—and once there, never letting go. My dreams and many of the images I continue to create reflect the four decades I’ve spent guiding fly fishermen and wing shooters in Southwest Alaska. I’ve recently decided to hang up my guide boots and devote whatever time remains to painting its landscapes, capturing their mercurial color and light reflected.
As I continue to paint the Alaskan landscape, human figures have become less significant, often subordinated to the environment. When a figure appears in my newer work, it is most often a lone person contemplating some aspect of the day or the view before them. This device, called Rückenfigur, is a German term describing a composition in which a person is depicted from behind, their face hidden from the viewer. The technique, popularized by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich during the 19th-century German Romantic movement, invites the viewer to identify with the figure and vicariously experience the scene. It can evoke feelings of longing, mystery, or existential reflection, as the viewer imagines themselves in the subject’s place. This device was famously used by Andrew Wyeth in his painting Christina’s World.
Click on an image to review pricing and availability.
There’s a long history of artists painting their friends and contemporaries, and this painting has connections to both. The subject is my friend, the painter Paul Puckett, photographed by another dear friend, the Swedish photographer Per-Anders Nilsson. Paul and P-A were invited to participate in the Artist-in-Residence program I initiated at Bristol Bay Lodge, and spent two lovely days on the coast of the Bering Sea, fishing, painting, and photographing the Negukthlik River in the expansive Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.
While Paul’s shadowed face is somewhat visible, I still consider this a use of Rückenfigur, as it draws the viewer into the scene and evokes a sense of mystery and reflection.
While I drifted the outlet of the Agulukpak River and swung streamers to arctic char, my buddy crossed the lake with his guests to fish for northern pike in a shallow grassy bay. The idea was that we’d meet for lunch, and plans would be made for the rest of the day over fried fillets of freshly caught char and pike.
When my friends motored up to the lunch spot, there was a good-sized moose rack occupying most of the boat; they’d found it along the shore in the pike slough and brought it back to show us.
Bull moose shed their antlers each winter, so this specimen met his demise sometime in the fall, either to a hunter or perhaps a brown bear.
We placed the monarch’s crown in shallow water to clean away some mud and grime, and I took a few photographs, which I’ve painted several times as a Memento Mori, a Latin term meaning ‘remember you will die’. The use of a skull motif is an ancient practice of reflection on our mortality that goes back to Socrates.
The Grant River is the headwaters of the famous Wood River watershed, which drains into Bristol Bay near the fishing village of Dillingham. I was introduced to the Grant as a new guide in 1984 by The Boss, my friend and mentor, Bud Hodson. It’s a short river by Alaskan standards, just seven miles long, and begins in a high, windswept lake that is isolated by a series of barrier falls. I’m told the lake is nearly barren of fish, with only a few wizened char whose ill-fated ancestors were trapped there and left to feed upon their own young and aged.
Downstream from the outlet of the lake, the river meanders through a low and wet meadow, slowly gaining speed and depth until it tumbles through a series of craggy ledges. It plunges finally, over a cliff of such height that the pool at its base becomes the furthest limit of migration for any of the millions of salmon that return to the watershed. It’s both the end of the line and the source of a mysterious journey.
Once the sockeye arrive to spawn, the river becomes an important source of food to a number of brown bears, and it’s not unusual to share the river with them.
I never tire of painting the myriad of moods the constantly changing Alaskan weather has upon the landscape. This painting is based on a photo taken out the window of a de Havilland Beaver one stormy day, just as we’d passed over Hope Creek on our way to the Agulukpak River.
Images worthy of painting are all around us, and especially so in Alaska. This scene unfolded outside of my window just as our chartered flight from Anchorage descended through the clouds on the downwind leg of its approach into Dillingham. As the plane turned to base over Bristol Bay, we lost minimum visibility, and the pilot called a missed approach; not uncommon when flying in coastal autumn weather.
I’ve witnessed this scene countless times over the past four decades, preparing to land on Lake Kulik and walk up the Grant River with my fishermen. Even so, I find myself compelled to paint it again, each time recording the change of weather and seasons upon the land.
