ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – A Cordova-based landscape painter has spent many years transferring Alaska’s landscape into art, and his work is being showcased at the Anchorage Museum.
Artist David Rosenthal has studied glaciers all around the world — including extensively right here in Alaska — and there’s a message behind his realism paintings.
“It took my life’s work to get here, which has been great. I’m kind of an accidental artist,” Rosenthal said.
He was an aspiring physicist. He said he has always had a scientific look at the world, but when college didn’t work out, he started to draw for the fun of it.
About five years ago, he realized his work is more than just realism paintings.
“There was a lot of information recorded in my years of painting glaciers,” he said. “And I had a ringside seat because Cordova is in the middle of the remnants of the Ice Age.”
He paints what glaciers looked like during his lifetime — the glacial retreats that he’s witnessed — and he’s also used his artistic license and scientific research to go back in time.
One set of artwork in the ConocoPhillips Arctic Gallery at the Anchorage Museum includes three paintings of Childs Glacier near Cordova. The first is from Rosenthal’s first view of it around 1977.
He also has a painting that depicts how he saw it in 2019, and for the third, he used his research to show what it likely looked like around the end of the Little Ice Age.
He wants the exhibit to be educational and hopes it will attract attention and give legitimacy to the changes he’s studied.
“You can tell this is realism, and I’m not making this stuff up,” he said. “So, that’s kind of the goal of the show, is to communicate and educate without getting involved in controversies. Just, ‘This is what I saw,’ or ‘what I see and what I’ve witnessed.’”
Anchorage Museum Assistant Curator Rachel Boesenberg said the exhibit is a unique opportunity for visitors to see how a landscape changes.
“Most people come to a museum, and they see a view of a glacier, and it’s this stagnant glacier, but the reality is that our landscapes are changing constantly, especially now as the climate is warming,” Boesenberg said.
This exhibit has been to multiple museums across Alaska, and Rosenthal hopes it will one day make it to the Lower 48.
The exhibit opens to the public Friday. The event runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Rosenthal is giving a presentation at 6:15 p.m. Friday.
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