To hear from artist Duke Russell, click play below.
There was a woman who wanted to gift her son a painting, and she had the idea of the Valley of the Moon Park, which many people refer to as Rocket Park. So when I came upon this Ward Wells image of the rocket, it was in such clear view that that's what I chose as my reference for this painting. I think the size of the trees in the background were really interesting. Nowadays, the trees are very prominent. And, as I looked at aerial photographs of kind of my home in the 50s, the trees all over Anchorage were just a lot smaller. And I'm kind of fascinated by this because you just don't think of something like that changing as much as it is. And it really has transformed the city in ways that folks that haven't lived here for 50 years would probably never think about.