Alaska is such a land of verticals that it can only be fully comprehended from the air or by boat. Mountains plunge directly into the sea from the great heights. Hamlets, towns, and even cities, long and narrow, exist at the very edge of the water and climb up the mountains. Steep woods rise behind harbors carved into the mountainside.

It was the verticals that attracted me here, sailing around a bend and finding this hidden mountain cove... a dense forest of masts of ships, the pattern repeated above in a dense forest of tree trunks. The ever-present mountain mist makes abstract design possible, used here not only for atmosphere, but to lead the eye through the painting from vertical to vertical.

- Nita Engle