A letter from Denis Keogh,
Curator of Collections and Exhibits,
Cordova Historical Museum

The Cordova Historical Society is proud to lend its support to the artist's project "Painting at the End of the Ice Age" by David Rosenthal.  Rosenthal has been part of the Alaska art world, both statewide and in Cordova, as an artist and educator for over 40 years.  We applaud his decades long work to observe and capture some of the astounding landscape we enjoy in or corner of the world.  His work reminds us of the reward of looking long and closely at the world around us.  In the geologic scale of things, the exhibits forty years of painting is but a moment in time, but a moment of significant change. Wonders seen forty years ago are either gone or soon will be.  Rosenthal's work provides us with tangible evidence of the progression of events in those decades.

For countless contemporary hominids, the term Ice Age is one that, until very recently, had a kind of quaintness to it, words to be dusted off in memory to find a context within our own lives.  "Ah yes, the Ice Age.".....  something recalled from time as a youngster in the thrall of images of wooly mammoths, saber toothed cats and dire wolves.  Presented simultaneously to the child, all the beasts were lumped into the same scene, with no time to explain eons, eras and other troublesome details of the geologic scale.  There is something fascinating still about how and why all those megafauna wonders no longer walk the earth, their disappearance coinciding with ice sheets that suddenly covered whole continents, or something like that.  Vague abstract concepts of science somehow account for the way the world is at present while offering little evidence of the mythic landscape scientific descriptions conjure.  From the credulous child to the non-scientist adult and all phases in between, other than the need for a seasonal change of wardrobe, we present day hominids live lives consciously disconnected from the wondrous and capricious processes of nature.  The notion of catastrophic events capable of altering the globe on a grandiose scale has been a novelty reserved for fiction.  From 1950's sci-fi movies, where overacting and new technology could overcome the worst radiation, and hideously mutated insects to more recent high tech hijinks with earth threatening asteroids or plain old zombies, we're always sure to find a way out of every predicament. 

The forever giving, ever forgiving mother earth recently had a change of attitude, however.  Nature is giving us wakeup calls, and they have been coming in for some time, louder and more frequent.  Nowhere is this truer than in Alaska.  In a place where people take no small pride in being resilient, with a will to persevere and the wits to get out of any fix, news in the last few years has garnered the attention of us all.  There are many perils actively adding to a picture of pending cataclysm: rising sea level and loss of sea ice threatens marine and human life; thawing tundra releases greenhouse gases at an immeasurable level; wildfires burn on a new scale of enormity; rising sea temperatures threaten heretofore healthy fish populations.  Virtually every aspect of the globe and its inhabitants is affected.  This list is just the tip of the proverbial and literal iceberg.  As Alaska's climate slowly evolves from frigid and deadly cold towards that of a spa, nowhere are changes more apparent than in its countless glaciers.  The vast but shrinking remnants of that mysterious Ice Age connect us to events beyond any human memory in the place we call home.  Few people are more appreciative of the state of Alaska's glacial ice than artist David Rosenthal.  As an observer drawn to places with cold as a primary, identifying feature for more than forty years.  Rosenthal has occupied a ringside seat at the edge of the ice in its many conditions, from Antarctica to Greenland.  He is a transplant to Alaska who got a look at the effects of the glacial ice scouring the landscape early in life in his home state of Maine.  Rosenthal's adopted home is Cordova, on the eastern edge of Prince William Sound, one of the most glacier rich environments on the planet.  Since the late 1970's he has been making hundreds of paintings of this place and countless others.  He is self-taught in traditional oil painting tecniques and is unapologetic about his personal esthetic of realism.  Rosenthal's practice is steeped in the study of science and human perception, with a working knowledge informed in equal parts by direct observation and the study of scientific disciplines.  His voracious appetite for reading about geology, glaciology, physics, and more is all in the service of rendering the many places he has visited.  A conversation with him about a painting will invariably include detailed descriptions about the formation of sea ice at certain latitudes, how certain atmospheric conditions affect the light in either the Austral or Boreal environments, the physics involved in the creation of nacreous clouds, or a host of other topics.

Through the Artist-in Schools program, Rosenthal has traveled the length and breadth of Alaska, from Southeast to the Arctic.  Twice he has traveled on icebreakers in the high arctic.  In 1988 Rosenthal journeyed on the USCG icebreaker "Northwind" north from Tromso, Norway, past the island of Spitzbergen, reaching almost 83 degrees north.  In 1989 the USCG "Polar Star" traveled from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Thule, Greenland and through the Northwest Passage to Alaska, with Rosenthal aboard.  A season on the Greenland summit Ice Cap allowed him to witness in depth yet another frozen place.  He spent ten seasons working in Antarctica, either as and artist for the National Science Foundation or as support personnel for research scientists.  After painting through four austral winters and six austral summer, its likely Rosenthal has  depicted the Antarctic environment more than any other artist.

David Rosenthal's chosen path of chasing the rarefied light of the most austere locations at the farthest ends of both hemispheres has resulted in a visual chronicle unlike any other.  Through perseverance, discipline, and a sense of awe of the world, Rosenthal has amassed a body of work that allows the viewer the opportunity to see parts of the beauty in places that continue to instill a sense of objective reverence in him, places incredibly remote, but now on the minds of us all.  It is certainly worth taking a good look at "Painting at the End of the Ice Age",  here at the increasingly rapid end of this most recent Ice Age.  Besides getting a glimpse of the beauty of the world, perhaps we can get a sense of the change that is upon us.

Denis Keogh
Curator of Collections and Exhibits
Cordova Historical Museum