Tanana River Archives | Carol L. Douglas

Mt. Hayes and the Alaska Range, by Carol L. Douglas

Sometimes when we rework old oil paintings, there’s a temptation to repaint the entire surface. The new paint looks lush and full; the old paint is dull and thin. That’s particularly true when you never got past thin layers in the first place. That old turpentine-thinned paint has oxidized. The drying leaves a pitted surface on the top of the paint, which appears chalky and grey.

You can bring the color back up in these passages by varnishing, but you really shouldn’t paint into varnish or medium, no matter what you might have read elsewhere. The “fat over lean” rule applies even to old paintings.

If your painting is thoroughly dry, you can brush a light coating of turpentine or mineral spirits over the painting. That will bring up the colors of the oxidized passages long enough for you to make your corrections. It ought to stem the urge to repaint the whole thing. Of course, if large areas of your paintings are oxidizing, you’re not using medium correctly.

On Friday I shot an extremely short video of myself changing the color of the traps in a tree line. I sent this to a reader who was wondering how much paint to use in this correction phase. It doesn’t have much in the line of production values, but it might be helpful.

The painting of Mt. Hayes and the eastern Alaska Range was painted near Delta Junction, Alaska. It was early in our trans-Canada trip. Although it appeared surface dry when I wrapped it, the thicker white paint in the river and sky squished and flattened under the weight of subsequent paintings.

This was a simple resurfacing job—and that was a very good thing, since I have no reference photos. It also gave me the chance to adjust the color of the Tanana River, which looks like light chocolate milk, it’s carrying so much silt.

Lake of the Woods, by Carol L. Douglas

I’d realized after I left Lake of the Woods in western Ontario that I’d never actually finished painting in the sky. This was a very simple fix, but I used the moment to add a little warmth to the water in the foreground.

In the last painting, I corrected a lie. I’d intended to paint a house surrounded by fields and a windbreak, but couldn’t find the right combination of side road, farm and fields. In real life, my subject was fronted by a low waste area of reeds but I’d edited that out.

Windbreak, by Carol L. Douglas

When the glaciers from the last ice age receded, they left behind millions of shallow depressions. These wetlands are known as ‘prairie potholes.’ They are significant resources for plant and animal life and support millions of breeding waterfowl, whose numbers are being threatened as the potholes are drained for large-scale farming. I really shouldn’t have excised them from the one scene in which they appear, and it makes me consider whether I want to add a studio painting that does the potholes justice.

I expected that deleting the field and reinstating the reeds would take me a long time, but it was done in fifteen minutes or so. I will probably incise a little more texture into the reeds, but it’s never going to be my favorite painting.

“The Alaska Range,” oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

Neither rain nor snow nor threat of sleep deprivation shall keep us from our appointed rowdiness.

Mary and I coined that as our trip’s slogan. It’s insane. Mary has a cold and I’m feeling an irksome scratchiness to the throat. We can afford for one of us to be ill, but if both of us are down, who’s going to drive?

These long days are taking a toll. We are up at 6:00 AM, and in bed late at night. Even with this, we’ve made little forward progress, at least on the map. Still, we’re making some progress. One more day to clear Alaska and be back in the Pacific Time Zone.

16th century illustration of placer mining. The Gold Rush prospectors used essentially the same technique.

Yesterday, we followed the Richardson Highway south and east from Fairbanks. This road tracks the Tanana River through the richest gold strike area ever found in Alaska.

Gold was first found here by Russian settlers in the 1850s. Sporadic attempts to prospect and mine were made throughout the 19^thcentury but it was not until the Klondike gold rush of 1896 in neighboring Canada that the madness was on.

At Big Delta, the Tanana River spreads into myriad fingers of water and gravel bars stretching into the far distance. This area must have seemed irresistible to placer miners trying for the next big strike. In 1902, gold was discovered here. It would end up being the most lucrative strike in Alaska history.

A spur trail was built from Gulkana on the Valdez-Eagle route to the new mining areas around Fairbanks. Rika’s Roadhouse, north of Delta Junction, is one of the few tangible remnants of the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail.

Enterprising men panned for gold, and other enterprising men and women provided support. Rika’s was built in 1910 by John Hajdukovich, who sold it to his manager, Rika Wallen, in 1923. She paid “$10.00 and other considerations.” We might conclude that John owed his manager money, or worse. Wallen ran the roadhouse into the late 1940s and lived there until her death in 1969.

Swank digs: a picnic table and a fire pit!

Compared to the Dalton Highway, the Richardson Highway is downright luxurious—it’s completely paved, and there are occasional gas stations. Still, it’s easy to see how miserable conditions were for those old prospectors. It’s still summer and temperatures are dropping into the 30s overnight. As calm as the Tanana looks from a distance, walk down to its edge and you realize that line of shadow on the closest bar in the river is actually a high, overhanging bluff. The river is large and boils along like milky chocolate. Those men deserved every penny they wrested from that inhospitable earth.

We resolved to not drive at night any more in moose country, so at twilight we stopped at Moon Lake and paid the princely sum of $18 for a camping site. Ah—the precious luxury of a chemical toilet and a fire pit! Still, both of us are feeling a bit gamey right now and a hot shower is starting to seem like the Holy Grail.

Just set it and forget it! Campfire risotto.

At dusk, I painted a small study while Mary cooked dinner. The only other visitors in the park were four young German tourists. After we exchanged greetings, they ambled off and got high by the light of the setting sun. Marijuana is legal in Alaska, and evidently it’s a tourist attraction.

“No Northern Lights tonight,” oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

My goal for this trip was eight hours of painting and driving per day. That was not very realistic, and the pace is part of the reason we’re flirting with head colds. After my summer in Waldoboro, I should have remembered that everything takes longer off the grid.

Category: Tanana River

Fixing mistakes

The Alaska Range