JOHN MARIN (1870-1953)
Tunk Mountain (1,845m- 6,053ft)
United States of America
In Tunk Mountains, Autumn, Maine, 1945 watercolor, The Phillips collection.
The mountain
Tunk Mountain (1,845m- 6,053ft) is a mid-elevation peak located in Okanogan County, Washington State. The peak is most famous for its fire lookout tower which still exists today. In addition, the mountain is important to peakbaggers due to its status as one of the most prominent peaks in Washington. With 2013' of clean prominence, Tunk Mountain is the 140th-most prominent peak in Washington, one of only 144 peaks with at least 2000' of clean prominence.
The summit originally had a lookout tower built during 1933 by the United States Forest Service, but its primary purpose was as a detection point rather than a fire lookout. The original lookout tower was a 40' tall pole tower with L-4 cab. The U.S. Forest Service later transferred ownership of the tower to the State of Washington. During 1966, the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) destroyed the original lookout tower. The organization replaced it with another 40' tall tower but with a live-in cab included. After many years the lookout tower was no longer officially used by DNR, and the organization sold the tower to private ownership during the mid-1990s. The private group has a special use permit allowing the tower to remain on-site, and volunteers maintain the structure.
The Tunk Mountain lookout tower is listed on the National Historic Lookout Register.
The painter
John Marin was a seminal American modernist painter. He was one of the first Americans to employ techniques of abstraction in his calligraphic depictions of landscapes and city streets. Along with Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, Marin helped introduce a new aesthetic model for American painters. “I must for myself insist that when finished, that is when all the parts are in place and are working, that now it has become an object and will therefore have its boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides, and bottom bound as a boat” he once reflected.
Marin started his career in art later in life, graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1901 at the age of 30. In 1905, he travelled to Europe, lived in Paris (1905-1909) where he developed his signature watercolor technique and met the artist Edward Steichen. It was Steichen that introduced his work to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who mounted Marin’s first solo show in 1909, and financially supported the artist over the remainder of his career.
Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
He developed a more dynamic, fractured style from 1912 to depict the interaction of conflicting forces, and gradually evolved summary ways of rendering his vivid impressions of sea, sky, mountains or the skyscrapers of Manhattan. In the 1920s worked almost exclusively in watercolour; after 1930 painted largely in oils.
2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
