Mountain hillsides checked with clearcuts, loaded logging trucks, long lines of railroad cars filled with logs, and mills sawing logs into lumber are some of my earliest memories. During the depression my grandparents left the cutover and cleared forests of Wisconsin and the dustbowl farms of the Midwest for a new life––to work in the forests and mills of Oregon and Washington.

My first forest wildland experience was as a teenager in an Outward Bound winter course in the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon. A few years later I took a summer seasonal job working for the US Forest Service as a fire crew member in the same area. I had already set course as an art major at university but each summer I returned to the woods. I worked as a seasonal wildland firefighter for over twenty years.

The visual memories of my personal history in the northwest’s forests have become emblems for me of the omnipresent crisis of our time, the creation that man’s activities have resulted in––a new epoch in the earths history, the Anthropocene.

These paintings are my observations, recollections and memorials for the forests and wildlands but these changes in the west are not isolated to this region. It is not an exaggeration to say the world is ON FIRE.