“The Visitor” 2026 by Mook Simpson
24″ x 20″ Oil on Canvas. Painted on a reproduction of “Mount Corcoran” 1877 by Albert Bierstadt.

The original sits in the “Frontier Pornography” category. Making the West look as luscious and accessible as possible. The land and it’s inhabitants probably had their own POV on this. these images from a foundational part of the myth of the frontier that got America so excited as it moved from the East to the West through the 1840s to the 1890s, looking for new land, new wealth, new freedom.

Bierstadt first called the painting “Mountain Lake,” a fictional composite of various mountain vibes from the Sierra Nevada. He’d already named a real peak “Mount Corcoran” back in 1868 to flatter wealthy banker and collector William Wilson Corcoran, then renamed the canvas to match and offered it to Corcoran’s gallery in 1878. It worked. But the mountain he’d pointed to turned out to already be called Mount Langley. Over the years, in 1891, 1933, and finally 1968, bureaucracy kindly moved the name around the peaks there until it found a final home on a ridge south of Mount Langley.

Anyway, respect to Bierstadt for the hustle. The original is one of those epic, empty, beautiful mountain scenes that spoke to a vision of wilderness and infinity. Oh, and that charming little bear.

I was going to call my painting “Big Boy” but I’ve called it “The Visitor” instead, and am keeping it vague about whether we’re talking about the big creature, the small baby creature, the bear or potentially the viewer I suppose.