Mid-Monthly Art: A Summer on the River

A Summer on the River is another Alaska-inspired painting, one based on the view from my parents' cabin on the Kenai Penninsula. I'm actually not that great at coming up with titles for my paintings, and don't remember what the original title was right now. I probably have notecards of this painting with a different title. Maybe it was "Put Your Feet Up," or maybe that was a suggestion that I didn't use.

The contraption I have my feet on (yes, those are my toes), is a wood stove,

made of left over pieces of oil pipe used at the several fields on the Kenai Peninsula. The guy who made it, Cotton Moore, was a pipe welder who managed to save pieces of pipeline, mostly odds and ends.... He saw a market... and made outdoor stoves for many years after the main pipeline construction was finished. [Our stove] was made shortly before his stockpile ran out.

This description is from the source, the owner of said wood stove.

It was summertime, 1997, and I spent a good portion of that summer at the family cabin on the Kenai River. It was a particularly warm and unusually sunny summer. We took advantage of the weather, and did a little fishing, which we would have done even if the weather had been more typically cool and cloudy to rainy. In between times, we ate lunches and dinners out in the Alaskan-style covered picnic shelter, and we enjoyed evening fires in the custom-made wood stove.

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Original work Copyright © 2003.
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