Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

In the last days of August 1918, as the Great War ravaged civilization and the Spanish Flu pandemic swept across the globe, the painter and philosopher Rockwell Kent arrived on a small island in Alaska's Resurrection Bay. He was thirty-six, dispirited and destitute, seeking what he called "the ultimate."

"These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands," Kent wrote during his seven-month sojourn in the wilderness, a meditation now preserved in his book Wilderness.

For Kent, art was never mere craft but a spiritual practice. "The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself," he reflected. "It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it. We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite."

Driven from Newfoundland years earlier by suspicion of his artist's soul, Kent found in the northern wilds what the soul craves: "Snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery."

In solitude, the soul expands. In wilderness, the infinite becomes visible. This is the artist's true vocation — not to create, but to receive and record our "particular portion of the infinite."