“Most of my paintings are based off of how a place makes you feel,” says Alaskan artist Meg Smith.
Spread Your Wings: Alaskan artist and pilot Meg Smith captures the warm tones and "glow colors" of a winter sunset in a painting inspired by the Alaska Range.
Smith flies her Piper PA–12 Super Cruiser—sometimes on skis—around Alaska to find inspiration for her artwork. “Some of my paintings I do from photographs, but most of the time it’s just out of my head after going for a flight,” she says. Smith takes iPhone photos and returns to her newly built hangar home and studio on a private strip in the Talkeetna Mountains, where she lives with her husband and six-month-old son, to paint brightly colored landscapes using acrylic paint. “I like the sharpness that you can get with acrylic versus oil,” says Smith. For the past five years, Smith has painted the official poster artwork for the Great Alaska Aviation Gathering—Alaska’s largest aviation event. “One thing that’s pretty unique and awesome that I do with my airplane,” Smith says, “is, because Alaska has such remote towns, when I refill my artwork at different galleries, I fly my artwork into the local airstrip and the gallery owners will meet me there and pick up my work.”
Smith paints near her first airplane, a Taylorcraft BC-12D, in the Neacola Mountains.
I’ve used my airplane in lots of ways for my art, and flying out to places like the Neacola Mountains to paint is one of them. It’s a spot that I go often to go fishing and it has really amazing white sandy beaches, too, which you don’t find in Alaska because it’s all black sand..
Fly On: A de Havilland Beaver over Lake Clark.
A Beaver on floats is the quintessential summertime experience for people who are not just pilots but also people who come up here to visit. Because they end up flying out into the mountains, mostly on Beavers, into these really cool lake areas and fish and camp and do all the adventures.
Sky Shredder: A skiplane leaves tracks on a glacier.
I’m an avid backcountry skier, so I started flying on skis to be able to get to more places in Alaska to go skiing. I didn’t realize how much I was going to fall in love with the actual flying side of it when I first started. It combines my passion for skiing and flying together.
Free Spirit: The Northern Lights illuminate the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains of Alaska.
We flew into the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains for a ski camping trip and a couple of nights we were there the northern lights were dancing across the sky. When the northern lights are out the wolves will howl at them. I painted a small version of this in my tent.
Flight of Two: Friends fly over the Knik River.
This is based off of the Knik area, but it also looks like Skwentna and the Yentna River. I try to keep my artwork not necessarily to a specific zone, so that when other people see it, they can relate to it in their own experiences and way.
Above It: Landing on a sandbar.
This is based off of the glacial braided rivers of Alaska and flying over top of it. It’s such a cool bird’s-eye view and I wanted to put that onto a canvas in a way that was abstract, but you could still see what it was.
The Dora Keens: The Dora Keen Range is named after the first woman to climb Mount Blackburn in Alaska in 1912.
The Dora Keens is an area in the Chugach Mountains that is at the back of the Prince William Sound in between the Harvard and the Yale Glacier. The mountains just shoot right up out of the ocean to the highest peak in the Chugach. It’s one of my favorite areas.
Kollin Stagnito
Senior Vice President of Media
Senior Vice President of Media Kollin Stagnito is a commercial pilot, advanced and instrument ground instructor and a certificated remote pilot. He owns a 1953 Cessna 170B.
With the power of thousands of pilots, members get access to exclusive content, practical benefits, and fierce advocacy that helps enhance and protect the freedom to fly.
