Losing the light

Longtime Kenai Peninsula homesteader and artist Norman Lowell died Sept. 2 at the age of 96, about two months before his 97th birthday.

Lowell painted extensive scenes of Alaska in a variety of mediums including acrylic, oil, pastel, watercolor, tempera and charcoal.

Lowell, his wife Libby (Elizabeth), and their eldest daughter, Laurie, moved to Alaska from Iowa after Lowell served in the United States Air Force starting in 1947. They established a family homestead on the ridge above the Anchor River about 4 miles south of Anchor Point in approximately 1957. The artist’s personal studio was built in 1974 and the Norman Lowell Gallery dedicated to his lifetime collections as well as many other artifacts from around the state was completed in 1996, according to information provided by the gallery.

The gallery is now managed by Barnabus Firth, who was hired five years ago, although he worked with Lowell directly as a teenager. The 9,000-square-foot gallery is open to the public during the summer season; in 2024 there were approximately 6,500 visitors. The winter is closed mostly due to the steep hill leading up to the gallery and studio and difficulty in maintaining the road during the period of seasonal snow. The gallery rooms are designed to show early works, pastel and watercolors, and later works related to Lowell’s journey through eyesight reduction that culminated in legal blindness in 2013. He created his final painting in 2017.

Firth provided the Homer News with a tour of the gallery and studio and details about Lowell’s Alaska art career. Firth said the gallery currently houses about 400 of Lowell’s pieces with another 100 in the family house and many in the studio. There are approximately 850 pieces of work on the property in total, which is about half of Lowell’s entire body of work, Firth said. The rest of the pieces have been sold across the United States, internationally or are held by family and friends.

“One of the things that people often notice in the gallery is that there aren’t a lot of pictures from the Homer or Kachemak Bay area. We have some prominent Anchor Point scenes, Cook Inlet, the Illiamna Mountains and the regional rivers but most of the Homer pieces have been sold,” Firth said.

There are also paintings in the gallery from all regions in the state of Alaska. The gallery operates fairly self-sufficiently, mostly from the sales of prints, though it does occasionally still sell original paintings that are pulled out of storage, Firth said. The gallery also takes donations.

Firth said Lowell traveled across the state to sketch nature scenes. “He typically would just take his sketchbooks and wander out into the wilderness or climb up into the mountains. He loved just sitting for several days and watching the different weather and the different light and he would come back to the studio in the winter building his paintings off of the black-and-white sketches.

“It’s really a remarkable testament to the way that his memory worked, because a lot of the actual color painting is from memory.”

Both the gallery and a book published in 1982 titled “Alaskan Cache of Thoughts and Sketches” show sketches that include human objects — typically cabins, churches, other public structures, mining camps and fishing boats — but fewer with human characters or images of wildlife. The publication also includes self-composed poems to accompany the sketches.

In the introductory commentary to the book Lowell wrote, “There are many moments along the trails to painting locations and many more at the scene, when one sits or walks alone in silence, overwhelmed by the glory of the moment. Knowing you are alone, some word must be spoken, some thoughts must be written. Hence these excerpts taken from the sketch pads that Norman Lowell used on some of his painting trips in Alaska.”

Some of the excerpts are composed as poetry and some are just quoted commentary that accompany the sketches.

“On the wooded trail to the old water reservoir near Seldovia, Alaska I found this Sitka Spruce and sketched it in the rain,” Lowell writes next to an image of a Seldovia ancient spruce tree.

Other artists are housed in the gallery, also. Some of these are contemporary but other pieces are historical items collected during Lowell’s travels across the state, such as a kayak hanging from the ceiling in his studio that Firth said is from Arctic Alaska that washed up at Point Barrow, near the community now called Utqiagvik.

“Lowell was really interested in the general history of the state, and you can kind of see it in his art. There are several different phases that he really was interested in and depicted. There’s obviously the pioneering and the homesteading era. But, he was also keenly interested in researching the Russian influence, the Russian traders that came over and had a lot of influence, and then, of course, the Alaska Native cultures prior to that,” Firth said.

Other pieces are art made from material such as whale bone or walrus ivory. One artist with several pieces in the gallery is Franklin Matchian, still actively working and living in Anchorage.

The 160-acre homestead where the gallery is located was established before the new highway was installed and the property was much more remote than it is now, Firth said.

The family would park on the old Sterling Highway, cross the river and hike a 3-mile trail to the homestead. Firth said the location was chosen partially due to sunlight availability for the gardens and greenhouse and partially for the view of the Illiamna and Redoubt Mountains across the inlet that Lowell could look out at from his studio, and the proximity to the Anchor River.

“This was the artist’s sanctuary tucked into the middle of nowhere. He liked to paint in the natural sky light here with a view of the mountains,” Firth said.

The new highway was established in 1961 and the family was able to install a driveway to the property. Lowell’s current studio on the property was built in 1974 and 1975. Firth will occasionally provide informal guided tours, if requested.

Before the current gallery opened in 1996, Lowell would bring visitors into the studio and sell work from there. About the same period when the artist was experiencing blindness, the studio required renovation for a leaking roof and the gallery has worked to address that, as well. One of Lowell’s final paintings is still housed in the gallery space.

Lowell’s daughter Laurie Glanville helped him create and run the gallery in its early years and she provided written comments on her family life on the homestead to the Homer News by email.

“Growing up on the homestead, in many ways was a great way to grow up. I learned how to be comfortable in nature. No fear in the wilderness with God watching over us. We grew our own food, hunted, fished and picked wild berries. A different set of priorities in life are formed growing up this way. Monetary things were less emphasized and day by day life was, just lived. The last few years were an extra physical challenge for Dad. I was impressed by his continual thankfulness and positive spirit. If you were to have asked him about this, I know he would have told you that he was able to meet those challenges daily, only with the help of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” she wrote.

The gallery intends to host a memorial reception in late October but there are no established plans for it yet.