June in the WUI

SOLD

11” x 14”

Oil pastel, gouache, and acrylic on panel

Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)

noun

1. the WUI is the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development. It is the line, area or zone where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.

June in the WUI depicts an increasingly common sight - the foreboding bloom of a new summer wildfire in a backcountry community. There’s a lot of WUI out there and the folks who live in it are becoming increasingly aware of the term as it is used to characterize regions vulnerable to wildfire. The night before I began this piece, my sister and I were talking about how we were looking forward to summer, but (especially coming from California) summer now also comes with heightened wildfire threat. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be summer anymore for explosive fires to spark - the northern California Camp Fire that my family barely escaped from which burned 18,000 structures happened in November, and the Boulder area Marshall Fire that destroyed over 1,000 homes erupted on December 30. Sister was thinking about a raft trip she took on the Salmon River in Idaho last summer that felt “claustrophobic” because of how much smoke was in the air. It’s a strange new world that deserves to be painted about as the national WUI continues to grow by approximately 2 million acres per year (Source: The U.S. Fire Administration).