Above Timberline

Images from the High Sierra

From the time I was a child, my parents took me up to the Sierra.  As a toddler I rode on my father’s shoulders through the mountains of the Mammoth area, and later we went on family trips with the Sierra Club.  I started backpacking as a teenager, and my favorite area was the Eastern Sierra, where the mountains were high and raw.  Hiking in from Mammoth, Bishop and Lone Pine, the Sierra is a massive wall of granite.  Once you get above timberline the patterns of the uplifted and glacial-carved rock is no longer muted by the forest. 

My paintings reflect my strong interest in pattern and color, and in simplifying this landscape to its compositional elements.  My work has been influenced by the writings of John Muir and his ‘Range of Light’ as well as the paintings of Edgar Payne, Chiuri Obata and the photographs of Galen Rowell.  Many of these paintings have been inspired by my brothers, Tom and Wayne Landis, who have not only taken me with them on many backpack trips, but provided me with endless source material on The Sierra.