Matte poster
On the wall, a front-facing arctic wolf, in a high-collar silver jacket with a silver chain over white fur, against a mint-green background. This is an arctic wolf poster, a print ready to frame, and it's Benjamin, a character from my Animal Kinhood series.
Canis lupus arctos
A route done well doesn't need you to explain it afterwards.
High Arctic tundra, exclusively north of the tree line: Queen Elizabeth Archipelago (Ellesmere, Axel Heiberg, Devon, Ellef Ringnes) in Canada and northern Greenland. A landscape of permanent permafrost without tree cover, with temperatures that swing between -50 °C in winter and 5-10 °C in the brief Arctic summer.
This print captures what you see: a wolf with flawless white fur, small rounded ears, amber eyes and a black nose, wearing the silver jacket open with that thin chain as the only glint of shine over the grey and white. I created it front-on with a plain, soft mint-green background: on a wall, it doesn't need anything around it. The arctic wolf wears that white all year round, not just in winter; here he is just as he is, with no landscape or props.
In his story, Benjamin repairs weather stations. At twenty-two, on his first long route across the Queen Elizabeth Islands, the weather closed in at Isachsen and the pickup plane took five days to arrive. Forty-seven below zero, three days' food stretched to five, a generator he fixed with whatever he had on hand. It isn't the danger he remembers: it's the clarity, he'd never thought so calmly before. For him, the cold isn't a hardship, it's home. Animal Kinhood is the series I've spent years creating, portraying animals dressed in the lives of ordinary people; if you like it, there are more creatures in the rest of the collection.
