Tag Archives: Alaska

The Alaska Range

  “The Alaska Range,” oil on canvas board, by Carol L. Douglas Neither rain nor snow nor threat of sleep deprivation shall keep us from our appointed rowdiness. Mary and I coined that as our trip’s slogan. It’s insane. Mary has a cold and I’m feeling an irksome scratchiness to the throat. We can afford […]

Above the Arctic Circle

  Light snow above the Arctic Circle, by Carol L. Douglas. I didn’t even know I had a bucket list, let alone that painting above the Arctic Circle was on it. But as I crossed the Yukon River, I realized that no amount of bad road was going to stop me from seizing this opportunity. […]

Up Ship Creek

“Up Ship Creek,” oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas If you were to clone Aroostook County, stamp it out an infinite number of times, and suck out all the people and most of the potatoes and roads, you would have created Alaska. Oh, you’d need to crumple your finished drawing too, for Alaska is […]

Painter of the Taiga

Wandering around Denali last week, I came upon a sign bearing a faded picture of a painting by Belmore Browne. A hundred years ago, this artist came within a few hundred feet of being the first person to scale the mountain then known as McKinley. Now he’s pretty much forgotten. In 1906 explorer Frederick Cook […]

Photographic promiscuity

There was a time when I was very interested in photography. I learned how to shoot pictures when one used an external meter and instructions on the box. My dad was a photographer during WWII. He had a darkroom in the basement, and I loved messing around in it. My husband was as keenly interested […]

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

I recently realized that my whole reason for painting is that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Most landscape painting is a pale copy of God’s creation, but it’s a way of sharing the natural world with others. It is, in some ways, more factual than photography. Photographs are accurate in the minute, but […]