McKinley From The Ridge

I painted this one on July 3 from a location about 50 miles as the crow flies from the big mountain. We were visiting friends who have a great cabin outside of Talkeetna. When the mountain is "out" (that is, not creating it's own little cloudy weather system) this is their view! It's a challenge to paint the mountain from this location because there are few reference points by which to indicate its impressive size. It towers over the landscape. You see it here with a foreground of about a million trees.

The artist most associated with Mt McKinley is Sidney Laurence, who was actively painting the Alaska landscape in the first decades of the 20th century. His views of McKinley solve in various ways the problem of how to suggest its monumental scale. He is known to have worked near the Tokositna River, about due south of the mountain, and not too far from my location for this painting (I am to the Southeast). Here is a link to one of his paintings of the mountain with the Tokositna River in the foreground. More details on his life and images of his paintings can be found here.

This painting is SOLD.