Throughout this past year, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly captivated by the landscapes of Washington. When I began my time at the Seattle Prize, I never imagined how profoundly the Pacific Northwest would reshape the way I think about landscape painting. As I started thinking about a culminating piece to mark the end of my first year, I knew I wanted to create something that celebrated one of the most unforgettable places I’ve experienced.

This painting depicts Mount Shuksan in the North Cascades, viewed from the remarkable overlook known as Artist Point. The name couldn’t be more fitting. Few places I’ve visited offer such breathtaking panoramic views in every direction. Yet even surrounded by alpine meadows, distant peaks, and endless ridgelines, Mount Shuksan immediately commands your attention. It is one of those rare landscapes that feels almost too dramatic to be real.

With this piece, I’m drawing inspiration from the great painters of the Hudson River School. Their work sought not merely to document the landscape, but to elevate it into something sublime, emphasizing atmosphere, scale, light, and the emotional experience of standing before nature. That sense of awe is what I hope to capture here. I want the painting to slow people down, to invite them into the scene, and to remind them that there are still places in this world capable of leaving us speechless.

Ironically, spending time in nature was never a significant part of my life before moving to Washington. I appreciated beautiful landscapes, but I rarely sought them out. This year has completely changed that. Exploring these mountains has given me a new appreciation for the restorative power of wild places and for the perspective they offer. In many ways, this painting is a love letter to those experiences and an invitation for others to discover them for themselves.

Of course, no painting can truly replace standing before a mountain like Shuksan. But I do believe painting can offer something different. A great painting doesn’t simply record what a place looks like. It distills an experience. It allows an artist to emphasize what mattered most emotionally, creating an image that can inspire wonder long after the moment itself has passed.

I’m still considering exactly how the human figure will fit into the final composition, but at the moment I’m planning to include a single, very small plein air painter tucked into the lower right corner. At a place called Artist Point, it feels like an appropriate presence. More importantly, the figure serves as a reminder of our own scale. Faced with a mountain of this magnitude, the painter’s attempt to capture it becomes almost impossibly ambitious. There is something wonderfully humble about the act of trying to compress the grandeur of creation into a single rectangle of canvas. It is, in a sense, an acknowledgment that we can never fully possess or contain such beauty, only respond to it.

At six feet wide by three feet tall, the painting is large enough to invite viewers into the landscape and encourage them to experience it rather than simply observe it. Over the coming months, it will continue to develop through many layers as I refine the light, atmosphere, and surface. I’m excited to share that progression as I bring this final major project of my first year at the Seattle Prize to completion.