Byron Birdsall's Alaska
By Byron Birdsall; Alaska Northwest Books; 2015; 104 pages; $18.99
Byron Birdsall is an Alaska treasure. For decades he has rendered the landscapes of the 49th state in paintings rich with color and detail. His summer scenes explode with flowers, animals and sunlight, while his images of winter, where snow covers the ground and twilight darkens the sky, are alive with elaborate hues and stellar lighting that belie the notion of Alaska as a desolate wasteland for half the year. If a single word could summarize his iconic work, it would be "electric."
Thus, in musical terms we could call his new book, "Byron Birdsall's Alaska," his unplugged album. Here he does something he hasn't often done before: He restricts himself to black and white and pen and ink, while placing his majestic landscapes in the background and instead focusing on the human Alaska.
"Byron Birdsall's Alaska" is a history book as well as an art book. The drawings here range in time from shortly after the United States purchased Alaska to the pipeline era, although most depict life in that long stretch between the end of the Gold Rush and statehood.
In her brief introduction, popular novelist Dana Stabenow writes, "Byron says that most of his inspiration for these sketches comes from the online photography archives of the University of Alaska and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center."
Instantly recognizable
That these drawings are based on photographs is immediately clear, and some will be instantly recognizable to Alaskans. The famous scene of prospectors swarming up the approach to Chilkoot Pass is rendered here, as is a well-known shot of buses passing under the hand-hewn wooden sign welcoming visitors to what was then known as Mount McKinley National Park. There is also Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, collapsed several feet deep after the 1964 earthquake. Alaskans are intimately familiar with these images.
Stabenow continues: "But a photograph only freezes a moment in time, it doesn't interpret it. In his sketches, Byron's pen thaws these moments into a liquid reflection, a ripple of light and shadow connecting present to past."
This can be seen in another drawing from the earthquake, where a man stands atop the rubble, his face and posture suggesting that somehow if he waits long enough, it will all return to normal.
Fortunately, most of the drawings are less dramatic. What they depict is the slow but steady intrusion of people into Alaska and the frontier culture that prevailed until recently. The development is seen with the arrival of ships, then trains, followed by roads, planes and, ultimately, the pipeline.
Birdsall's drawing of the White Pass Railroad perfectly captures the visually frightening engineering of that route. A train steams over a scaffolded rail barely clinging to a mountainside.
Technology transition
The technology transition that rapidly overtook Alaska is beautifully captured in a drawing of downtown Skagway circa 1930. The town itself retains its frontier architecture, yet power lines stretch over the street while a streetcar line runs down its middle. Meanwhile a trio of automobiles are parked in front of buildings, waiting for the imminent moment when they will become dominant.
A similar period is captured in Ketchikan, where pedestrians still outnumber cars. A steamship looms over the end of the avenue, and totem poles compete with utility poles for dominance.
Also in Ketchikan is a sketch of Creek Street, set sometime between its heyday as that city's red-light district and its current incarnation as a tourist mecca. This allows Birdsall to zero in on the architecture of the buildings and boardwalk rather than those two industries -- each exploitive in their own way -- that have kept the street alive.
Architecture is something Birdsall pays close attention to here. As could be expected, his intense focus on details finds constant expression, perhaps even more so than usual given that he's aiming for texture rather than color. In some of the buildings depicted, it seems as if he has meticulously drawn every brick. Immense time must have gone into it, and it lends these works their photographic feel.
A personal favorite comes at the book's opening. A drawing of Seattle's Pier 2 around 1927 finds cars and crowds of people gathered to board the Alaska Steamship. Having grown up in that city, it evoked childhood memories of trips to the waterfront, where the presence of all things Alaskan is inescapable in those long wooden buildings jutting from shore. It captivated me as a boy with dreams of the North, and it drew me here as an adult. Birdsall, who now divides his time between Alaska and the Seattle area, pays homage to the deep and longstanding connection between those two places.
The drawings zigzag back and forth through time, moving across the state geographically rather than chronologically. A sizable portion is devoted to Anchorage, where Birdsall has long dwelled. The Southeast also features prominently. Nome and Fairbanks come late in the book, and the Arctic is never seen. Nuggets of history are offered in the brief captions, but the emphasis is on the pictures themselves. The atmosphere is of Alaska in what we would like to believe was a simpler time. While this might not have been the case, it was certainly less hurried and more remote.
In his own foreword, Birdsall writes, "I have been painting and making a living at it for the past 34 years. Think of it, painting all day and having a roof over my head, with enough left over for groceries. Such has been my happy lot."
It's been a happy lot for Alaskans as well. Even after a nearly 40-year career, Birdsall is still showing us our home in new ways.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.