by Thia Marine

So. How do you describe paradise?  Paradise is where I grew up.

My family owned half a mountain. Or I should say we had the privilege of living at the foot of it. Mountains in Alaska are wild things and vast, and not readily owned. Since I was born in Alaska and lived in Alaska for 38 years, and since I have traveled a lot of it, camped it, hiked it, canoed it, summer and winter-climbed it--I know a bit about it.

As to the mountain, when you fly into Anchorage and look north, or if you go online and type “Eagle River, Alaska,” Wikipedia has an aerial photo, double click to enlarge, and on the upper right side, you’ll see a mountain with two rock faces that is officially named Mount Magnificent. We homesteaded the left half as you face it.

My parents were one of the first five families to live in Eagle River, north of Anchorage. It is a narrow valley which was then wilderness and now has the Eagle River Nature Center and holds a town of more than 20,000.

In her forties, my model-beautiful grandmother from Phoenix Arizona moved to the base of the mountain with my step-grandfather, grandson of a Navajo chief. After their cabin burned down that first winter, they lived in a large canvas tent.

My large-equipment loving father was from Mississippi and my artistic mother from Arizona. They met in Alaska and started a 180 acre homestead near my grandparents. 180 acres of childhood bliss.

We had five fields of timothy-rye, each larger than a football field, along with six lawns closer to our house. Eagle River consisted of homesteads scattered up the valley, and after a few years had a one-room store and two-pump gas station. A man named Barkley had a homestead at the current Eagle River Nature Center where he raised horses (which the bears loved), and as a small child, I remember meeting an ancient man who had run a trap line on our mountain when he was a boy, in about 1910.

I spent every single day outside in our fields and woods, and as a teenager, climbed every weekend. Friends (one a professional guide on Denali) and I did the Chugach Mountains: near Eagle River, above Eklutna Lake, above Anchorage, and near Hope, along with the Talkeetna Mountains, with their endless winding valleys. We climbed summer or winter. Some mountains took eight hours of fast climbing to reach the summit, and once a field of snow-pack I was on shifted as if to start an avalanche. Did I mention bushwhack-snowshoeing and skiing? 

Eklutna Lake (Idlu Bena, "Plural Objects Lake," from a Dena' ina Athabaskan story) itself was also special. The mountain at the end of it was called Nugi Qeneh, "Bold Mountain." My father built structures for the Army back at the end of the lake; and we camped along the road beside it (it was open to cars then). I later climbed on its glacier and went beneath it where I saw car-sized boulders suspended overhead in the aqua-blue ice. Then I later lived near cross-country ski trails, where I skied six days a week through the pristine forest.

I also drove and camped in the Interior, going to Fairbanks and to the town called Circle, located on the Arctic Circle, overlooking the Yukon River. I boated the Tangle Lake system, and drove to the Kenai Peninsula; Seward and Homer, and to Copper River and Valdez. I took the Alaska Ferry System to the small towns in Southeastern, Juneau, Skagway and Haines, and also took it to Kodiak, as well as flying out in an old WWII double prop (DC 3) with wooden slats for floors. I went up in small planes, and once over to Mount Susitna, also known as Sleeping Lady. I camped in Denali Park, climbed in Polychrome Pass (where a friend was attacked by a grizzly), and sent messages by public radio to a climber-friend who stayed in a cabin on The Mountain.

I've traveled to Europe a few times to take in the art, and rented an apartment in Paris for six weeks, in an area with no tourists. My accent was good enough that several neighbors thought I was French---until I tried to respond to their jokes!! Now, having recently lived in a small logging town in California (while missing Alaska terribly and planning to move back) I went to my art studio and started painting from my photos. I had to keep a glimmer of that magical place near me until I can get out of the Lower 48 and back Inside—inside a land that is its own world; silent, vast, and startlingly beautiful.

Then I had the thought that maybe people who had traveled there might also want to keep the magic of Alaska near them. So I started this website. My watercolors are of specific places, not some random mountain or made-up scene.

As to artistic ability, I inherited it from my Art Major mother. As to training, when I checked out art schools; I discovered that beyond the introductory levels, most focus on abstract art. In fact, at one art college, someone who is now a successful artist was told they didn't belong there if they wanted to create realistic portraits. When another art major was hired at ad agency, he asked them to teach him how to draw, saying his professors had lectured about it, but had allowed little time to actually do it. An art college near me cost $80,000 for four years, and the Senior Projects shown on their website consisted of birds done with tissue paper, abstract marker work, an oil painting that was the back of someone’s head (nice hair), and a pencil drawing of two faces. Those were the highlights of thirty or so Senior projects, for $80,000? 0 I could draw faces like that when I first started.

So I purchased college text books and books by successful artists (seventeen in all) and I worked through them. I studied Color Theory, Art Composition theory, and Watercolor Techniques. That was fifteen years ago. At first, I ratcheted in painting between work (law offices and the Department of Defense) and returning to college (History major, invited into a National Honor Society), so I painted small and sporadically.

Ten years ago, I painted more, and four years back, I worked through an old used book, The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, and ventured to paint larger, at 22x30. Now I paint at 33x40---almost every single, glorious, radiant day.

To get a kid's eye view of what it was like to grow up in the wilds of Alaska, go to Amazon for the book, "Pirates in Alaska: Growing up with a Mystery near Anchorage," by T.F. Marine.