Rape of a Forest/Road to Rocky Mountain House

This image features my painting from the environmental series “Murphy’s Law”, and is the centrefold from the Fall 2004 edition of the quarterly magazine “Legacy, Alberta’s Heritage, Arts & Culture”.

The clearcut logging controversy rages on to this day.  Back in the early 2000’s I was often at the Lazy M Ranch near Caroline, Alberta, with other artists. Margie and Lane were awesome hosts and made the ranch a virtual haven for artists. Delicious food, great horses to ride, lazy afternoons to while away at our painting, quiet evenings of camaraderie and a hot tub to ease our horse riding bones.

One day, I got a phone call from Margie. The ranchers in the area were more than a little agitated by all the clearcut logging in the area. It was hurting their livelihood as cattlemen, their dude ranch eco-tourism, the watersheds, the  wildlife habitat, and the pristine forest landscape in general. Margie literally begged me, as an artist who knew and loved the area so well, to help them in some way.

Ultimately, a group of 16 passionate and environmentally concerned artists travelled the Alberta forest regions to document the ravaging effects of clearcut logging.  Subsequently, an exhibition was mounted and hung in the Bowman Arts Centre, Red Deer, Alberta, which was a part of Alberta that was severely impacted by this devastation of Canadian forests. 

This exhibition proved to be extremely well received by the public, the proof being that upwards of 3500 people attended in the weeks the show was running. The follow-up of the public’s  interest was that CBC Radio later interviewed me on the clearcut logging subject. That further piqued the interest of CBCTV and a mini-documentary was filmed on this unpopular logging practice. The film crew followed four of us artists to one of the disastrous Alberta clearcut sites and caught each of us on camera, raw emotions in full view. After that film session, the crew filmed us at the Lazy M Ranch’s secluded mountain site and showed off the opposite side of the situation - a pristine mountain setting, with those same four artists, previously so laden with sadness, whooping through a joyful horseback dash through the nearby creek.

The final scene in the documentary was taken in my studio and showed me just beginning this painting that was eventually featured in the Legacy magazine.