‘‘Suddenly the sky appeared like it was split in two, high above the forest, the whole northern sky appeared to be completely covered with blazing fire.”
On a morning in June 1908 there was a large explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in a sparsely populated region of Eastern Siberia in Russia. The explosion, which has become known as the Tunguska Event, flattened an area of 2,000 km2 (770 sq mi) of forest. It is now generally considered to be the result of an asteroid airburst which entered the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated before hitting the ground. Over the years many other theories have been been suggested to explain the event, such as a collision with a black hole, an experiment by Nikola Tesla testing his “death-ray” or the explosion of a UFO.
Expeditions were sent to the area in 1921 and then again in the 1950s and 60s and they photographed the still flattened trees of the forest. This series of paintings is based on a selection of these photographs.