July 30-31, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

“Later in the century, painters of talent and vision would go north to stay. If many of them produced larger bodies of northern work than Kent, and in the end had a greater impact on the image of Alaska, none captured the spirit of the northern landscape with greater passion and clarity than Rockwell Kent.”
Kesler E. Woodward in Painting the North: Alaskan Art in the Anchorage
Museum of History and Art (1993)

As we travel back 100 years ago today, Rockwell Kent and his eight-year-old son, Rocky, are also traveling – west -- riding a Canadian Pacific Railway train on their way to Alaska. “I was probably not overly excited,” Rocky remembered about the five-day trip. Moving from place to place was just part of life in the Kent family. He had little knowledge of Alaska, and there would be no school to miss. Kent believed, travel and home schooling was the best education for his children. Kent had been reading the English poet and artist William Blake and his theories about education. Public schools squeezed any creativity and individuality out of children, Kent believed. On Fox Island he devoured Alexander Gilchrists biography of Blake and the poetry – Songs of Innocence and Experience. You can see that influence not only in Kent’s “adventure of the spirit,” but also in some of his art. Blake’s poem “The School Boy” may have reminded Kent of his own early education.

The Schoolboy
From Songs of Experience

I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn, -
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning's bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care's dismay, -

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?

Both Kent’s sons, Rockwell III and Gordon eventually earned doctorate degrees, one in chemistry, the other in physics. I was fortunate enough to meet and interview both men. Gordon was the youngest of Kent’s children. In the 1930’s, Kent took Gordon to Greenland with him. Rocky was his first and oldest child. A few years before he died, I met and interviewed Rocky at his home on the Uxbridge Road in Massachusetts. He gave me some great insights into his father and their stay on Fox Island. Around that time, he wrote a few memoirs about his Alaska adventure for The Kent Collector. Over the years I’ve gotten to know Chris Kent, Rocky’s son. For a time, he lived in Alaska and I traveled with him to Fox Island and into the Kenai Fjords. He also has given me much insight into his father and grandfather.

Kent and Rocky had dinners on the train. The other meals they’d “wolf at station lunch-room counters.” The scenery enthralled both father and son, and they often sat on wooden seats outside on a flat car, “with soot and cinders raining over us.” Rocky later recalled that only the rain, the dark or “cinders from the coal-burning locomotive” drove them inside. Kent had written to his wife, Kathleen, on August 1st that father and son looked like “stokers” when they left the flat car. But that was Kent. He had to absorb life in all its elements. If that meant taking risks, getting dirty, getting wet, or getting in trouble – those were the prices he was willing to pay. 

The jagged, snow-topped peaks of the Rocky Mountains “protruding high above the lakes and dark green forests,” made an impression on Rocky that lasted the rest of his life. On August 2nd, Kent wrote to Carl Zigrosser that there was something “marvelously elemental,” about the prairie.
(Zigrosser was several years younger than Kent and a good friend. He was editor of the Ferrer Association magazine, The Modern School. The two shared their philosophy of art and life, and their disillusionment with a barbarous world at war. Zigrosser circulated Kent’s illustrated letters and kept him in touch with the art world while he was in Alaska.)

The prairie was flat, monotonous and bare, Kent observed – suggesting an infinite wildness reminding him of the sky and sea. As we’ll see later, Kent’s concept of physical “wildness” and “wilderness” was quite broad. In comparison with this barren beauty, the contrast of the frontier towns with “their insignificant tawdriness,” repulsed him. Thirty-seven years later, he could still envision “against a noble, distant mountain panorama, a gimcrack {flimsy or poorly made but deceptively attractive} false-front structure proclaiming in huge letters: Royal Victoria Hotel.” 

Kent studied architecture at Columbia University and built several houses on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. Once he got aboard the steamship and observed the Inside Passage to Alaska, he had the same thoughts about the banal architecture set against the marvelous scenery.

Today I'm heading out to Fox Island. Looks like I'll get the kind of weather Kent experienced 100 years ago at Resurrection Bay -- overcast, cool, with rain expected. Not untypical for August along the coast here.

PHOTO

Kent did this black and white drawing during his stay on Fox Island and put a quote from St. Augustine beneath it. The image captures the artist's inner thoughts. The scenery is huge and sublime, and the people are tiny amidst it. They are overcome while trying to absorb the wonder around them. You can find it on p. 111 of the Wesleyan University Press edition of Wilderness with my foreword.