I grew up in Oregon; a beautiful and diverse natural wonderland located on the Pacific ring of fire where volcanic forces continue to shape the mountainous forested and desert landscapes. In the western Oregon which I consider my homeland the hillsides are checkered with clearcuts. In my youth loaded logging trucks dominated the roads, long lines of railroad cars were piled with logs, and in every town, sawmills turned logs into lumber. Paper mills and plywood factories completed the forest extraction industry.

During the depression my grandparents left the cutover and cleared forests of Wisconsin, and dustbowl farms of the Midwest to work in the forests and mills in Oregon and Washington. At an early age I lived with my Grandparents who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses apocalyptic publications were a strange counter to my childhood fascination with science, especially dinosaurs, extinction, and Darwin.

Historically Oregon is a bit of a political maverick. In 1964, as a US Senator, Wayne Morse was one of two members of the Senate who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized the president to take military action in Viet Nam without a declaration of war. In the early 1970s Oregon Governor Tom McCall urged tourists to “visit but please don’t stay”, which neatly fit into my zero-population growth and counterculture, hippy way of thinking. I was a teenager during the tumultuous sixties, and was deeply affected by political assassinations, protests, demonstrations and riots against the war and racial injustice. The wonder of the moon landing was tempered by the environmental crisis.

As a teenager, I had my first forest wilderness experience in Oregon’s Cascade mountains on an Outward-Bound winter course. A few years later I took a seasonal job working for the US Forest Service as a fire crew member. I was an art major at university and later a professor at Carnegie-Mellon but each summer I returned to the woods. I worked as a wildland firefighter for over twenty years. I lived in New York City for almost twenty years and now reside in the Hudson Valley. Each summer I return to Oregon where I volunteer at a remote historic Forest Service Station to do restoration work.

For decades my work has been an integration of my values, political and personal. The visual memories of my history in the forests of the northwest have become emblems of the omnipresent crisis of our time. Human activity has resulted in a new epoch in the earth’s history, the Anthropocene. These paintings are my observations, recollections and memorials for the forests and wildlands of the west. However, these sweeping changes are not isolated to this region, but endemic to the planet.