For Barry Lopez

This brief memoriam was originally posted midwinter 2020-21, following Christmas:

Each of us has our mentors, influences, people whose work strikes a primordial chord in our psyches that in some ways fundamentally guides our life, opens our mind to greater horizons, and fuels our inner fires. For me, I cannot think of any artist who has more greatly touched me than Barry Lopez.

I learned the other day that Barry, whose books I keep beside me always, passed away. I found Barry like most perhaps, through his book, Arctic Dreams. While meditating in tall book stacks one day in Portland years back in the nature/Arctic section, which I often do, I came upon an old signed copy of his most loved work. I must have spent an hour thumbing through the book, becoming instantaneously transported into Barry’s Arctic landscapes both contemporary and old, human and animal, marine and ice, from the disappearing floes to the coastal Thule settlements, across the Brooks and through the boreal forests of muskoxen.

Barry’s vivid pen, painstaking scholasticism, sensitive passion, and transcendent navigation changed my life. Less than three weeks after finishing that book, I was in the Alaskan Arctic, well above the Circle, in the Brooks Range. I have returned since this time to see how it changes.

As an artist, which I strive to feel capable to ascribe myself, my deepest influence and reverence lies not in another photographer, not even to primarily a visual artist, but to a man who alighted my mind with his own compass, both in time and geomagnetic direction, North.

Thank you, Barry. You touched so many of us. As in your own metaphor of an individual crane along a horizontal axis leading the flock upon locating an easier navigation, your artistry continues to lead the next generation forward toward our world’s most pressing problems through beauty, sensitivity, compassion, and vision.