Alpine Anatomy: The Mountain Art of Arnold Shives (2012)

Arnold Shives has obsessively hiked, climbed and depicted British Columbia’s mountains since the early 1960s. The fiftieth anniversary of his first extended mountaineering expedition seems an apposite moment to reconsider his work and life in the range of contexts that he himself created through the two activities that have been the focus of his practice: mountain climbing and mountain picturing. This book is the result of that reconsideration.

—Foreword

Arnold Shives is one of the most creative and probing mountain artists on the West Coast, and Alpine Anatomy: The Mountain Art of Arnold Shives ably and amply illustrates why this is the obvious case. The compact hardbound edition of Alpine Anatomy brings together, from a variety of informative sources, essays about Shives from such artistic and mountain worthies as John Grande, Bill Jeffries, Edward Lucie-Smith, Darrin Martens, Toni Onley and Glenn Wordsworth—it, also, is a superb survey of Shives’ outdoors and mountain art work from 1961-2010. There are many fine photographs of Shives at different mountain locations in the book that track and trace his mountain journey from the late 1950s to the present.