Alaska Landscape Paintings | Original Wilderness Artwork by Dominik Modlinski

Alaska has become a natural extension of my northern painting journeys, closely connected to my long-standing explorations of the YukonThis vast and powerful land offers endless inspiration, from sea kayaking along dramatic coastlines to remote wilderness encounters that fuel both plein air studies and large studio paintings. My Alaska landscape paintings capture the raw beauty and diversity of the North—coastal temperate rainforests, rugged shorelines, glacial waters, expansive tundra, and the stark, barren reaches of the Arctic. These works reflect the ever-changing light, weather, and elemental forces that define Alaska’s wilderness, celebrating its untamed spirit and profound sense of place.

Painting of the Denali Range in Alaska by artist Dominik Modlinski, depicting dramatic alpine peaks and expansive northern wilderness.

‘Denali Range’ 32" x 72" oil on canvas

Plein Air Studies of the Alaska.

Alaska has a way of recalibrating everything—scale, time, and your sense of place in the world. Painting there isn’t about chasing dramatic moments; it’s about learning to slow down and listen to a landscape that exists entirely on its own terms.

My plein air work in Alaska grew naturally out of years spent living and painting in northern British Columbia and the Yukon. Each journey north deepened my connection to vast, uncompromising terrain—places that don’t try to impress or explain themselves. They simply are, and in that quiet certainty, they demand presence and respect.

Many of these paintings began far from roads or comfort. I traveled by kayak and small boat along remote coastal stretches, then inland through the rugged terrain of the Denali and St. Elias/Wrangell ranges. Painting in these environments is both a physical undertaking and a personal reckoning. The land makes you feel small—in the best possible way—stripping away distraction, ambition, and ego, and leaving behind clarity, balance, and humility.

Studio Interpretations

These large-scale Alaska paintings begin far from the studio—out in the wind, the cold, and the quiet of the North. Each one grows from original plein air studies and field photographs gathered during expeditions across Alaska’s vast terrain. What starts as a direct response to the landscape becomes, back in the studio, a deeper exploration of its essence.

Alaska reveals itself in layers: open arctic expanses, towering mountain ranges, tundra glowing with fall colour, and long coastal fjords shaped by glaciers and rainforests. Through repeated journeys, I’ve come to see the land not just as scenery, but as relationships—between light and shadow, colour and form, and vastness and intimacy.

In the studio, the complexity of the field is distilled into bold colour fields and strong shapes. Alaska calls for scale. These paintings are large not for drama alone, but to reflect the balance between the immense and the small—the way a massive mountain face relates to a patch of tundra, or a glacier’s edge echoes a distant ridge.

They are not literal records of a place, but interpretations shaped by experience, memory, and time—works that carry the quiet strength and presence of the North into the spaces where they live.