GREEN INK SEEN: October 2011

Hell Canyon Fire – Regeneration – Reincarnation

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Hell Canyon forms a deep craggy fissure up the south edge of the 83,000 acre Jasper burn area in the southern Black Hills. In US Forest Service lingo “regen” is new tree growth (measured in board feet) after “harvest” (logging). Regeneration is also a spiritual renewal or revival and/or a physical renewal or regeneration after injury or as a normal process.

The USFS has proudly and disastrously managed a quintupling of Ponderosa Pine on the Black Hills National Forest. In a forest swamped with trees, the “Lumber Service” can only conceive of continuing the present program of rampant regeneration run amok. The USLS, as part of the Dept. Ag., cannot help but plant the next crop of Ponderosa, even in one of the few areas in the Hills free from tree infestation and its concurrent potential for out-of-balance bark beetle infestation and forest fire. That’s the back-story, the recent history, of Hell Canyon. So it goes….

This canvas is a drastic reworking of a 2003 painting entitled One Place – Hell Canyon; a work from the series 1 Place, 2 Ways x 10, in which Mark and Mary explore one place, in this instance, Hell Canyon, and subsequently each artistically respond to the place and day of hiking. Ten places were chosen for this project, which includes artworks, artifacts, black and white photos, and journal entries.

This reincarnation focuses on the chaos of forest fires, the event, the licking flames, roaring walls of fire, exploding trees, and haze of billowing and blinding smoke; it recalls ashes raining from the sky 30 miles distant from a fire consuming an acre a second for most of one afternoon. It explores the jumbled forms and textures of charred trees and fire-scoured white limestone plateaus, benches and cliffs. And, it remembers the natural regeneration in the aftermath, the new green shoots of emergent life reborn, the return of birdsong, and the sigh of sun-washed land freed of its overburden of trees in the wake of the conflagration.

Artist: Mark Zimmerman

Medium: acrylic on canvas ~ 40” x 30”

$2800 at: Green Ink Gallery and Studios