$900

I’ve often wondered what this part of Denver might have looked like before Union Station was built in 1881. Before the tracks, the streets and the buildings, there was prairie. And on that prairie there were bison.

I began with that simple thought: What if, for just a moment, we could see what was here before us?

But the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in recreating the past exactly as it was. This isn’t a historical scene. There was never a day when two bison stood grazing in front of Union Station while passenger pigeons wandered through the grass.

Or perhaps there was.

That’s the question I wanted the painting to leave unanswered.

The worn edges, faded colors and imperfections are meant to make the image feel like an old photograph, a fragment of some forgotten Colorado that might have existed in another version of history. But there are clues that something isn’t quite right. The station is unmistakably modern, while the animals belong to a landscape that has largely disappeared.

The bison are particularly important to me. Their story is one of near loss and recovery. They once numbered in the tens of millions across North America before being pushed to the brink of extinction. Today, they are still here. We didn’t erase their story completely. We found a way for them to survive alongside us.

The passenger pigeons tell the other half of the story.

Once numbering in the billions, they filled the skies of North America in enormous flocks. By the early twentieth century, they were gone. Unlike the bison, there was no recovery. Their extinction is a reminder that not every story gets a second chapter.

That contrast is what I wanted to capture in this scene.

Two animals that once seemed destined for the same fate stand together in the grass, but only one of them is still here.

Maybe this is a photograph from a past that never happened. Maybe it’s a glimpse of a future in which wild animals have reclaimed the spaces we’ve built. Maybe it’s simply a moment from another version of North America, where we learned to make room for the animals that were here before us.

I really don’t know.

I’d rather let the viewer decide.

For me, the hope is in the bison. The melancholy is in the pigeons. And somewhere between the two is the question that keeps finding its way into my paintings:

What would it look like if we made room for the wild?