Anastasia and the Porcupine Hills (2018)

Anastasia and the Porcupine Hills (2018), oil on canvas, 12” x 12”, private collection

The air is made of cold rain not yet fallen. It chills the tip of my nose as I step out onto the curving Range Road to get a better look. I’m searching the greens; bluish or bright, and the black wiry sticks of last year’s prairie shrubs. They are still sleeping in the cool still April. The Porcupine Hills of Alberta are special. The lie adjacent to, but are unlike the true foothills of the Rocky Mountains which are forced upward in the close crush of tectonic bodies. Rather the porcupines are the surviving forms of downward-pulling erosion; centimeter by centimeter, century by century, these hills remain.