Please click the image so it enlarges in your browser. The painting is 12 feet wide, the deer life-sized, so it’ll take a bigger screen than your phone to see it.
This is soon to be installed at Moran State Park on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound. It’s going to be high atop Mount Constitution, almost 2400 feet above the sea level. A new visitor center there will feature this large set of paintings as the main exhibit. I painted the background, all the art in the circles and deer separately. It’s all being fabricated in high-pressure laminate so it’s tourist-proof. EDX, the fine exhibit company I work with in Seattle did the design, text and all the rest for Washington State Parks, and Beth Gibson at EDX handled me – never an easy thing.
With this installation, I’ll soon have 18 exhibit paintings on or near Orcas Island. Another five are on San Juan Island next door, and two are soon to be installed on Sucia Island, a remote offshore park just to the north – wayside panels about salmon recovery. I’m thrilled with all this, because I spent much of the 1980’s living aboard my little boat right here and know the place well. It’s like I’m giving back for some very fine life experiences I had in that area, and especially Sucia Island, a really special place.
The strange deer! Because of the isolation of Orcas Island, the Columbian Black-tailed Deer that live there have a closed genetic pool (it’s an island), and so have evolved into what’s called a pie-bald form. These deer feature odd unpigmented skin areas, white skin and fur, but they are also smaller and somewhat oddly shaped. It wasn’t an easy subject to paint, but this little guy will be life-sized in the final installation. I took the most interesting features of several and stuck them together.
Spread across the background of Mount Constitution are a dozen smaller circle paintings with the real interpretation, stories about the geology, orca whales, forests and marshes. These had to be interesting paintings but not too complex as to be confusing. This one is about the mountain ‘balds’, areas of open prairie, glacial boulders and few trees.
All this was great fun for me. I love the challenge of painting big walls with lots of details all having various stories packed into one wall.
