Bill Burrows has enjoyed drawing and painting his whole life, but didn’t really start focusing on wildlife until, at age ten, his family moved from a Chicago suburb to Anchorage, Alaska. The year was 1963 when Alaska was very much “The Last Frontier” and the population of the state’s largest city was less than 50,000—people, that is. The number of moose and bear living in and around the city was large enough that sightings were almost a daily occurrence. If seeing a twelve-hundred-pound cow moose browsing in the neighbor’s garden wasn’t enough to spark a young artist’s interest, discovering the wildlife art of Bob Kuhn turned that spark into an inferno.

At the time, Mr. Kuhn was primarily an illustrator—mostly for Outdoor Life. With acrylic paint and charcoal pencil, he captured the world of the big game animals that magazine contributors wrote about like no other wildlife artist ever has. His impressionistic realism style was magical. What fascinated Bill the most, at the time, was how Kuhn created the illusion of details (especially hair and fur) without actually painting any detail. With flat brushes, sponges, palette knives, even his finger, his illustrations looked impossibly real—but never photographic. You could see the brush strokes and pencil marks if you wanted to. Or, you could just allow yourself to enjoy this invitation into the wild world as Bob Kuhn sees it.