Artists from three states showcase Alaskan wilderness at Brandstater

Klara Maisch, Lindsay Carron and Bill Brody are displaying a cornucopia of drawings, woodcuts, paintings, video art, and sketchbooks in “Wilderness Alaska,” an exhibit on display at the La Sierra University gallery through Nov. 7. An artists’ reception and panel discussion were held Oct. 6 to open the show which was curated by Gallery Director Tim Musso. He organized the exhibit based on images he came across on social media platform Instagram.

“After buying a print in Alaska last summer, I followed the gallery on Instagram. From there I became aware of the incredible work of Linsday Carron and Klara Maisch. I contacted both artists via email and the rest is history,” Musso said.

“Each artist spends extensive time in remote areas creating images based on full immersion and observation of their natural surroundings,” he said. “I hope the gallery visitor spends time immersed in the gallery and leaves with a sense of rejuvenation that wilderness often brings.”

Maisch arrived for the “Wilderness Alaska” opening from Fairbanks, her home town. She has worked as a professional artist, art instructor and wilderness guide in Alaska throughout her adult life and has exhibited her work around the state. Carron, a resident of Los Angeles who grew up in Wisconsin has also lived and worked as an artist in Alaska two to four months each year since 2014. In 2015 she began serving as an artist-in-residence for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service creating art for the Alaska national wildlife refuges. Brody, a retired University of Alaska art professor whose rich paintings and carved metal work can be found in museums around the state, travels every summer back to regions where he has spent previous decades from his more recent home in Florida. He hikes onto glaciers and deep into the wilderness where he captures Alaska’s dramatic landscapes. He paints entire canvasses on location. 

The state of Alaska is the largest of the nation’s 50 and possesses a coastline that is 10 times longer than California’s. Its physical immensity is comprised of an equally immense biological and geographic diversity ranging from moss-covered coastal rainforests to boreal spruce and deciduous forests, soaring snowy mountains, vast arctic tundra, rock and glaciers.

It is this breathtaking natural bounty and the indigenous peoples whose lives have been interwoven within its fabric for generations that inspires and drives the artists.

Of making art and chasing wilderness

For Maisch, an artist, skier and wilderness guide, art has been a calling from the beginning. She is the daughter of an artistically inclined educator and the recipient of a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her artistic life revolves around endeavors in the field – sketching, painting, writing, taking photographs. She works in a home studio and passes along her love of art and of nature’s wilderness as an instructor for Inspiring Girls Expeditions, an outdoor skills program for 16-18-year-olds. “I get to teach art while on glaciers,” says Maisch.

She also has an ongoing mentorship with fellow “Wilderness Alaska” exhibitor Brody, an important aspect of continued learning that is part of the community of professional artists in Fairbanks.

Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Alaska including most recently Alaska Pacific University and Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks, with public art works created for Black Spruce Brewing Company, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and for schools. Commissioned work includes logo designs for Inspiring Girls Expeditions and Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, custom artwork for Fairweather Skis LLC, cover art and illustrations for publications. In 2018 she received a Career Opportunity Grant from the Alaska State Council for the Arts.

“Making art and chasing wilderness are highly intertwined personal endeavors, fueled by a compulsion to explore, and driven by a desire to respond by my surroundings,” Maisch says in her artist’s statement for the Brandstater show.

Maisch hopes to share a sense of place with viewers of her art. “Being in a wild place inevitably means you are experiencing grand dynamics of weather, water, light, and land,” Maisch said. “The interaction of these forces is what captivates me most and what I seek to convey through my work.”

Art as activism

Carron’s fascination with the things of nature took root in the surroundings of her childhood home in Wisconsin. “I spent many of my free afternoons poking around the yard exploring plants, insects and animals, collecting specimens, and drawing them in my sketchbook,” she said. 

The notion of art as career solidified during pre-college classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. While studying toward a Bachelor of Fine Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, she began to incorporate her artwork into her activism as she became involved in advocacy for issues important to her. “Art activism …is activating an idea through my art,” she said. “I allow the stories of people and land to translate through my drawings and be a conduit for ideas to be met with ease.” Her artwork has served a number of nature and other advocacy organizations outside of Alaska including the California Wolf Center, The Whale Museum of San Juan Island, Malibu production company Creative Visions Foundation among others.

Carron first visited Alaska in 2014 at the behest of a friend who asked her to provide summer painting tours as part of an adventure tourism company in Juneau. As her artwork gained recognition and community support grew she applied for and received a residency with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The following summer she created artwork in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge which included artwork featuring a Gwich’in tribal elder. As a resident artist, she has since created artwork of six refuges in Alaska and plans to create art for all 16 Alaska National Wildlife refuges.

To do her work in the far-flung reaches of Alaska, she flies to major cities and then travels by bush or sea planes to places along the Alaska coast or mighty Yukon River. “Alaska has been one of the largest influences on my life to date,” Carron said. “Alaska has brought me face to face with fear, courage, strength and challenge. My artistic practice has grown more brave due to my four years of travels as an artist-in-residence with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

She hopes viewers of the “Wilderness Alaska” exhibit will take away “an overwhelming sense of joy, wonderment and awe at our incredible earth and the absolute necessity to respect, reciprocate and rise up for what we love.”

Home of Innermost Longing

“The measure of art is how successful it is as an agent to alter and enrich the viewer’s capacity to experience the universe,” writes Brody in his artist’s statement for “Wilderness Alaska.” He has been trekking into the great state’s wilderness areas each year since 1989, painting on location, in silence for days with nothing but the sounds of wind and water, absorbing and bringing to the public consciousness the immensity and the intensity of his surroundings. “The Alaskan wilderness is my home of innermost longing,” he writes.

Brody’s interests in art have been lifelong. “I was one of those kids who would draw all the time. When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be an artist. My father was a composer, writing among many other things more than 50 art songs,” he said.

Brody was born in New York City and migrated to Southern California where he became a student of The Claremont Colleges, graduating with a math degree from Harvey Mudd College followed by a Master of Fine Art in painting from Claremont Graduate University in 1967. He moved to Fairbanks that same year to pursue his first teaching job and ended up living there more than half his life. He began making annual artistic pilgrimages into the wilderness in 1989. Between 2011 and 2018 he moved back and forth between Alaska and Florida, finally settling in the Orange Blossom State where he has continued to paint, including as an artist-in-residence in the Everglades in 2011. He has also pursued painting expeditions into the wilds of Siberia. 

Mostly, he has trekked into the heart of Alaska where he spends eight weeks, two of which are on glaciers near Denali, North America’s highest peak. He has taken 70 such trips. “The wilderness is my cornerstone,” writes Brody. “And when I’m in my studio alone, I recall the relative purity of the wilderness experience and try to attain that same clarity that I find in wild places.”

He works in a variety of media including woodblocks for printing which he creates out of planks of maple cherry or yellow cedar. Woodblock art he prints by hand on okawara or kitakata paper. He paints in oils and alkyd on clear primed linen canvas, carves wood sculptures, and has done a body of artwork in carved, etched and forged metal. 

His artistic explorations crossed over into the digital world. Between 1996 and 2006 he worked to develop a computer application to create sculpture in virtual reality. The BLUi application name stood for body language user interface.

Brody’s work is exhibited at The Alaska House Gallery in Fairbanks and has appeared in other galleries as well as in collections at the Brooklyn Museum New York, Arizona State University, Neville Museum Wisconsin, the University of Alaska Museum among many others around the country, as well as public and private collections. His many commissioned works in Alaska include a 4-foot-by-28-foot carved and painted copper piece for the Rabinowitz Courthouse in Fairbanks, carved and painted bronze panels for the Hutchison Technology Center in Fairbanks, and a 36-inch-by-144-inch oil painting for the Alaska State Criminology Lab.

Solo and group exhibitions include the Smithsonian Exhibition of Contemporary Alaskan Art in Washington D.C. and Wignalls Museum at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga. A roster of juried show participation and awards includes the prestigious State of Alaska Governor’s Individual Artist Award in 2011.

Brody said he hopes viewers of his work in the “Wilderness Alaska” show will be “moved to see the world differently, to feel connected with how the forces of nature play.”

On his artist’s website, Brody offers insights into the value wilderness areas offer the world.  “Wild places are important aesthetically, spiritually, scientifically, ecologically, personally, and socially,” he states. “People will probably mess them up through greed, hubris, and incompetence. It is vital to hold on as long and as tenaciously as we can so there will be something left at all.”