The Pine Beetle Painters
is a diverse group of individual artists from British
Columbia’s Robson Valley, a place of spectacular beauty and
remarkable biodiversity. The group’s name arises
from one of their great local concerns: the mountain pine beetle. Over
the past
decade, the beetle has ravaged our mature pine forests and changed the
nature and prosperity of our local resource economy, leaving our
communities struggling to find new directions in a new era.
As artists, we celebrate the beauty which surrounds us and focus on the
precarious balance between necessary changes and the preservation of
the wilderness for the future. The Pine Beetle Painters each
have a large body of work as individual artists, and they have taken up
the challenge of creating works on which each of the three members has
contributed. While nature often provides the focus for their work, they
intend to broaden their creativity to their work as a group to include
other styles and media.
The view here is of a marshy pond along Mount Robson's Upper Loop Trail in the southeast corner of Mumm Basin at an elevation of approximately 7000 feet (2134 m). The Basin lies about 1900 feet above Berg Lake so the usual view of the lake is not visible from this location. Robson's north face with its recognizable glaciers is evident on the middle and right panel. The prominent peak to the left is Rearguard Mountain behind which lies Robson Glacier.
Mumm Basin and Mumm
Peak (2962 m)
were named by J. Norman
Collie, a British alpinist, in 1910 after the first man to ascend the
peak: Arnold Louis Mumm (1859-1927), an English lawyer,
publisher and noted alpinist, from the Champagne family.
| Pamela Cinnamon | mountainfolkart@yahoo.ca |
| Keith Heidorn | see@islandnet.com |
| Bonnie Marklund | bonnmark@telusplanet.net |
The
background for this web page has been constructed using a photograph of
needles from a tree killed by the mountain pine beetle. It was then
given a canvas appearance and the color muted to allow the text to be
visible. The actual color of the needles can be seen in the thumbnail
on the right.