2009 Artists-in-Residence

“Alaska Range” 24” x 77” oil on board

Bill Brody

Alaska Range

“Alaska Range” was done representing the view from about two-thirds of the way up the upper trail from the Eielson Visitors' Center with Denali four-fitths of the way to the right side of the canvas. The residency was a wonderful experience for me and provided my first time to paint in the park on the summer side as all of my previous painting in Denali National Park has been on the winter side on the glaciers near Denali.

— Bill Brody, 2009

Bill Brody is an artist and printmaker who obtains inspiration for his work from the wilderness landscapes that he has been able to explore over the years. Sketches, journals, and photographs from his explorations are source materials for paintings, prints, and very large-scale works on forged and carved copper and bronze. A professor emeritus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Art Department, he is known for his innovative work on the Body Language User Interface (BLUI) project. Visit Bill Brody's website.

 

“At Home in High Places” 59” x 39” fiber art

Karin Franzen

At Home in High Places

It's an amazing experience to stand on a mountain ridgeline, an altitude obtained after hours of ascending drainages and traversing scree slopes, up as high as you can possibly go by foot, to watch Golden Eagles soaring overhead or contouring the slopes below you as they hunt. Deep in the mountainous regions of Denali National Park, the breathtaking and rugged landscape is their home. The strong emotional connection forged from observing and learning about the eagles provided the inspiration for my piece, “At Home in High Places.”

— Karin Franzen, 2009

The work of Karin Franzen revolves around one of her favorite subjects, the birds of Alaska. She uses skills honed over a lifetime: drawing, mathematics, structural design, sewing, an understanding of biology, and business acumen to create her work. Her fabric art is widely known and has been included in several important international and national exhibitions, including “Quilt Visions 2008: Contemporary Expressions,” “Quilts of the Pacific Rim,” and “Made in Alaska.”

 

John Morgan

The Hungers of the World: Poems From a Residency

I had been to the park many times before, but this visit I felt from the start that something extraordinary was happening. Being “in residence” means, in a sense, being at home, and having the wonderful Murie Cabin to live in made me feel a part of the wilderness whenever I stepped outside. These intimations culminated, toward the end of my stay, with the experience recounted in the poem “Vision.” The philosopher William James has written that one of the basic qualities of a mystical experience is that it cannot be captured in words. He may be right, but I felt I had to try. It was unlike anything that had ever happened to me before.

Most of the poems in “The Hungers of the World” are based on a journal that I kept during my 10-day stay. Two come out of earlier visits to the park. The forms used include free verse, accentual verse, and, in one case, a sonnet. I hope they begin to capture the range and suggest the impact my experiences had on me.

Acknowledgements

“The Denali Wolf” first appeared in the magazine Ice-Floe and “The Unnamed Lake” was originally published in The Northern Journal.

I wish to thank Park Superintendent Paul Anderson, Ingrid Nixon, Chief of Interpretation, and Annie Duffy, Arts Coordinator for Alaska Geographic for making my residency possible. I am very grateful to Tom Walker for putting forward the idea of having writers spend time at the Murie Cabin. Also great thanks to my wife Nancy for suggesting the idea to Tom during a field journaling class we took with him in 2008.

— John Morgan, 2009

 

• The Hungers of the World

  
  

  John Morgan reads "The Hungers of the World"

  Credit / Author:

  John Morgan

  Audio Transcript

  Arrival

  Denali National Park, 6-19-09

  Fourteen caribou at Sable Pass, pestered by a pair of long-tailed jaegers— bright barbs of ruckus, territorial, they swoop down like spear-heads, loop, wheel and shout.

  While focusing ‘binocs,’ my elbow hits the horn and baffled by the blare, fourteen caribou stop dead and stare.

  •

  Perched in flinty stillness on the porch—cupped ears and stubby tail—a resident ground squirrel sizes me up.

  •

  These green and ochre hills dotted and streaked with white, backed by the snow-splashed peaks of Polychrome, shift in softening light.

  •

  While foxes den a hollow hillside by the river, magpies flit, a rabbit grazes and moves on.

  •

  Browsing the cabin’s logbook, ten years of visitations, the tribute of one artist draws tears to my eyes: “It’s as if you dropped me off in Paradise.”

  The Unamed Lake

  (from a field journal)

  In memory of Charles Ott and William Ruth

  Slogged over tipsy muskeg, past a “moose wallow,” grizzly tracks, to reach this breeze- rippled lake, where, through waving horsetails, a golden-eye, her pesky offspring in tow,

  preens and dives. Across the sky-flecked water, spruce, then tundra meadows mount toward jagged Zs of rock. Like specks of white-out, Dall sheep line the ridge. If this place had a name, it’s been

  erased, in homage to two men whose ashes seed the hills nearby. They staked their lives on wildness beyond naming. Can we go back, reclaim the power of unaltered place? Blue and luminous, a damselfly lights on this page; two kingfishers weigh in, wheel off down the lake.

  Higher Powers

  Scanned across the East Fork with binocs and on a distant ridge, that funny-looking rock’s

  a golden eagle, eyes fierce and head erect, bill hooked like some- thing Roman, regal, as two

  more eagles circle in. Their wings straight on like wispy Vs, a child’s scribbled wings, but

  through a 60 power scope— unearthly things, Renaissance angels sifting toward the sun.

  The Denali Wolf

  Near the East Fork of the Toklat in the season that’s never dark I lugged my gear back from the road

  and while I slept through dusk a noise like trash in the suburbs being clattered away woke me up.

  When I stuck my head out of the tent flap the hoofed creatures were gone but what I saw at eye-level,

  like a fury sculpted in ice brought me to my knees. Once I’d wanted to paint a canvas

  some huge fanatical blue where the hungers of the world could settle and be soothed.

  Ten feet away, ears pricked, nose flaring, the silver-gray pursuer stared me in the face,

  then sensing I wasn’t prey whirled off along the river, and I watched him shrink to a point

  in imaginary time fleet as the fastest athlete I’d ever seen in my life.

  Day Six Journal

  Woke to heavy rain, low clouds, the wet-rag sky wrung out with little hope for change. But hey—

  it’s the park. Let’s go! And driving toward Eielson, the rain does change—to snow.

  There on a hillside, a mother grizzly playing with her cub— delighted with each other

  and by the frosty white, they roll and wrestle in it. At Eielson, a snowball fight

  pits kids against the giddy bus dispatcher. We take a hike. And later hike again near

  Stony Creek, noting a mound of grizzly scat beside a stretch of torn up ground

  where the ravenous bear rummaged turf for ground squirrels—earth

  gouged, mined, ripped, rocks tossed aside like ping-pong balls, a thorough

  thrashing of the region. Wild nature on a tear alters our perspective (after

  the playful grappling of mother and cub) on the crushing strength and menace of a bear.

  Vision

  Followed a fox toward Polychrome. Red smudged with black along its lean rib-cage,

  it rubs its muzzle on a former meal, ignores the impatient poet on its tail.

  Then nearing the overlook, sun shearing through low clouds transmutes the view to glitter. Everything’s

  golden, scintillant. I feel like a seedpod wafted into space and check my shaky hands on the steering wheel.

  As the road crests over its top, boundaries dissolve. Beside that sheer intractable edge, I greet my radiant center,

  discharge all my terms. How easy it seems to channel between worlds, my old self dying into a new,

  with nothing firm to hold me here but love. And that’s what nature has it in its power to do.

  The Head

  Nature, great creator, full of invention, fabrication.

  Day ten, went for a good-by look to the bank of the East Fork, glacial

  river, thick gray water. Suddenly a head pokes up. A fish, an

  otter? There’s no telling— barely seen, it vanishes.

  Dream? Illusion? Was it just a mental bubble?

  But then that same queer head pops up again, followed

  by the long-necked mottled body of a duck. Duck in a panic,

  flapping, paddling, launches a mad-dash for shore, and seems

  about to make it when the silted channel swallows it again.

 

East Fork Wolf, 14” x 29” acrylic on canvas

Gail Niebrugge

East Fork Wolf

When I paint it is intuitive, from the heart. I spend hours each day applying small dots of color one at a time with a tiny brush, and when I am finished I have a painting of something that reach my soul sometime during my life. My work is focused entirely on the contemporary landscape, wildlife, and flora of the wilderness regions of Alaska. With vast expanses of Alaska wilderness as my subject I've experienced extensive outdoor challenges, exploration, and adventure.

— Gail Niebrugge, 2009

Alaska painter Gail Niebrugge is known throughout the world for her use of pointillism, small-dot like strokes, in her work. She has completed seven major public commissions in Alaska, including a ten-panel multi-dimensional artwork for the U.S. Customs in Skagway. She was the first artist-in-residence for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and is the author of Gail Niebrugge’s Alaska Wildflowers, a book about her thirty-three years of work focused entirely on Alaska. Visit Gail Niebrugge's ebsite.