CAPTAIN DOUG LEEN

Tracking the lost art of the park poster

By Bart Ripp, The News Tribune

Only 2,000 of the original 2 million works have survived.

That one-tenth of 1 percent is what intrigues Douglas V. Leen. He is a Seattle dentist whose quest for vanished 1930s posters of national parks has given him a rollicking title:

Ranger of the Lost Art.

Leen’s chase has renewed interest in Works Progress Administration posters of national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Mount Rainier. Leen’s business, Ranger Doug’s Enterprises, sells posters, note cards and postcards of historically accurate and graphically enhanced sketches of America’s national parks.

Ranger Doug’s venture began in a barn. Leen worked for seven seasons at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. He stumbled onto an aging poster for ranger programs at the Jenny Lake Museum.

The poster was tacked to the inside of a Jackson Hole barn. Leen rescued the poster and nailed it to the wall of his log cabin at Jenny Lake. When he returned to dental school at the University of Washington, the ragged old poster was one of the few possessions he bothered to save.

“I just thought it was neat. And it was great art,” Leen said.

His art appreciation went public in 1995. Ever curious about posters advertising national park programs, Leen visited the National Park Service archives in Harpers Ferry, W.Va.

A parks curator named Tom Durant had the holy grail of posterdom – original artwork for a Grand Canyon poster. Leen began poking around the archives and found more original black-and-white art for national parks such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Zion and Mount Rainier.

The Mount Rainier poster advertises ranger programs such as nature hikes, field trips, trailside exhibits and lantern slide evening shows at Longmire, Paradise, Ohanapecosh and Sunrise.

Fortified with photocopies and starved for more information, Leen returned to Seattle and hired artist Mike Dupille, who specializes in serigraphy and could touch up the images with modern colors and techniques.

The WPA was a New Deal jobs program created in 1935. It funded thousands of new buildings, bridges and roads, as well as songs, plays, books and other works of art. It was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.

In 1936, a WPA artist named Anthony Velonis adapted an industrial silk-screen process for high-volume poster production. The medium, called serigraphy, became the stuff of art for 1960s creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Of the 35,000 designs commissioned by WPA artists and printed as 2 million posters, only about 2,000 survive, Leen said. Topics included art, theater, travel, education, health and safety. Many of the artists didn’t sign their work.

Leen’s mission has been to return these luscious examples of poster art to the public domain.

“I am determined,” Leen said, “that these beautiful images will never again be lost.”

See Ranger Doug Enterprises for more information...



Doctor Doug Leen
Locum Tenens Dentalis
Currently in Petersburg, Alaska
Captain Doug Leen
On the Historic Tugboat Katahdin
Currently in Petersburg, Alaska

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