I stumbled upon your website early this morning and wanted to encourage you that you're doing a great (and important) thing! I'm curious to know about your background, and how you became inspired to capture environmental projects on canvas?
I work in the reclamation space, these days spending most of my time in McMurray. Our business does quite a bit of revegetation work (tree planting, erosion control / bioengineering, seed collection, etc.). A good deal of my life has been spent working around some of the images you've painted (Bill's Lake, Bison ranch, etc.).
About four years ago, on a frosty early autumn morning, I was struck by the sheer beauty of some of the work we had just completed. A picture couldn't encapsulate what I was experiencing. I suspect that many of the same elements that came together to inspire you, had culminated in my own experience of inspiration. If I didn't translate what I was feeling to canvas myself, I was convinced that someone else needed to.
Here is what hit me: one day this will all end - but life doesn't have to. The industrial plant will be deconstructed. The business activity will leave, but the reclaimed landscape, and the life therein, won't. It has a force, an energy, and a will to live - one that doesn't care about a regeneration survey.
Most people cherish nature, and I think they have a subtle and unspoken understanding about the inherent life-giving force of nature. Very few people are meaningfully aware that reclamation is humbly initiating a "resurrection" type of power.
Seeing your work has brought back the warm memories of inspiration, which have ebbed and flowed for me. The grind of doing the work, dealing with the people and politics - I've allowed this sort of things to push inspiration into the margins. I'm really grateful to have connected with your art.
It's an important story, keep painting it.
Brett Henkel