A 'pigs-eye' view of the world

Jack Gunter Flying pigs get their say on the history and future of the area in Camano Island artist Jack Gunter's new book.

In "A Pictorial History of the Pacific Northwest Including the Future," Gunter's egg tempera paintings are displayed in a museum. An old, gnarly curator talks two young flying pigs through the displays.

"This is a very pig-centered book," Gunter said.

The book strings together Gunter's historical paintings from the area, with a story connected to each one.

"I am more of a storyteller than I am just a painter," he said.

Gunter has been painting the history of the Pacific Northwest for the last 30 years, creating around 500 paintings.

Originally from the East Coast, Gunter said he was fascinated with how recent history was in the Pacific Northwest. Elders living in the community remember settling in the area.

"Out here, we are almost pioneers," he said.

He's treasured the stories he's been told, like the time before World War I when a flood reached from Stanwood to Mount Vernon, and then froze solid the next day. Residents strapped on their skates and skated to Mount Vernon and back just because they could, he said.

The book provides a chance to make sense of some of Gunter's historydriven paintings, and exhibits some of his work from the 1980s to the present.

Printwise Inc., a printon demand publisher in Mount Vernon, printed his book.

Gunter used Photoshop to place the pigs within a museum, examining his paintings. He had already painted the pigs in various angles and positions.

The process of writing and putting the book together took about two and a half weeks, Gunter said.

Gunter's book is nonfiction, with some tongue in cheek comments and future possibilities, thrown into the mix.

After all, the future doesn't end with us, Gunter said.

"We just happen to be here in the middle somewhere," he said.

A tree from Camano Island really did travel to Paris to be the flagpole for the World Fair, Gunter said. The organizers wanted the tallest tree they could find so it wouldn't be dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower.

In addition, Stanwood did, at one time, have more cows than people.

The wingless flying pig was born into Gunter's imagination while he was a caregiver for his brother Steve, an early victim of AIDS.

To amuse Steve, Gunter painted a pig, a black and white Sus Essex breed, and made the pig jump. Then, by moving the trees, the pig took its first flight, evolving into Sus Essex Aviatrix.

"Flying was like an afterthought for this pig," he said.

Flying pigs have reappeared in Gunter's work throughout the years.

In one painting, they lived in tunnels in the tidal flats of Stanwood, and had to fly out to escape high tide.

Other paintings included in the book show the pigs using their flight to escape from the Denny Regrade. In the early 1900s, the city of Seattle removed the 400- foot Denny Hill.

In Gunter's Denny Regrade series of paintings, he shows life forming from flying pigs as tadpoles, to small mammals coexisting with dinosaurs and later, wooly mammoths. The flying pig watches on as the hill is formed, taken down, covered in city, seawater and eventually, ice age snow.

Gunter even took flying pigs back to the beginning, as pig-colored molecules, amoebas, asteroids and a thought from God.

"What I was doing was letting myself be a little kid," he said.

In one of the paintings, pig-colored molecules are floating in water, and in the background, lightning hits them, and more complex molecules form.

A 1950 experiment found that when electricity runs through a container filled with gases that would have been present as the Earth developed, proteins are formed, Gunter said.

The flying pig predicts saltwater intrusion on the islands, which Gunter said is already starting on Camano Island.

This isn't Gunter's first book. In 1974, Gunter wrote "The Gunter Papers," a science book that was printed by Avon. He's also written three novels, which have been published by Lightning Source, an international print-on-demand publisher.

Gunter is a former selfdescribed environmentallyaware science teacher, and painted the results of global warming as early as the 1980s.

Some of his futuristic paintings near the end of "A Pictorial History," illustrate overpopulation, the melting of polar ice caps and the rise of sea level.

Throughout it all is the flying pig.

The entire "A Pictorial History" is on Gunter's Web site. Paper copies of the book are available for $50, and most of the paintings are available as prints, and a number of the originals are available. For more information, go to www.jackgunterart. com or contact Jack Gunter at 387-9342 or flyngpig@camano.net.

Staff Reporter Kristi Pihl: 629-8066 ext. 125 or kpihl@scnews.com.