About
At the Mount Allan overlook my painting buddy jumps out of the van, pumps his fist and cheers like a drunken frat boy. If anyone was around I might be embarrassed, but it’s late September and the tourists have gone home, leaving us the run of Glacier National Park. Josh isn’t the quiet reverential type; he’s a rabid fan, cheering on a good landscape: the blue river below us turns into shadow and disappears behind the cliffs; timbered hillsides like velvet terminate on pale flanks of Mt. Allan. Light flares and within the hour evening shadows have settled in. For that hour we race to get it all in. I paint with a mixture of exuberance and anxiety – it’s my painting medium.
Why do we paint on location? I can only sum it up in Josh’s frat-boy cheer. Beauty is everywhere. Let’s go chase it!
I started my studies at The Art Institute of Chicago and moved on to an art college in Scotland. There I was introduced to mountains, to the Highlands. I’d return to the studio from climbing adventures and do my best to be clever and ironic. But my musings were for grass and heather, for rock and rain. At the start of my second year in Scotland some fellow art students invited me to take the bus to the medieval city of St. Andrews. We drew from the beach, looking toward the town taking in the sweep of the headlands. That rough charcoal drawing felt fresh and honest like nothing I’d ever done. On that day I packed up all my post-modern cleverness and became a landscape painter. For my final year of Art College I took the bus and train to the countryside and did charcoal and pastel drawings. My studio suddenly got a whole lot bigger!
The landscape even affected my love life: I’d kept up a long distance relationship with a girl from Montana for roughly two years. Even when she came to Scotland for a visit at the end of my studies I refused to think about our future together. Then I took her for a hike along my favorite ridge in the Scottish Highlands. I’m really not sure what happened, but at the base of the mountain I shocked the both of us by asking Lynelle to marry me. She didn’t answer, but I assumed a “yes” from the tight grip of her hug. We celebrated over dinner at the little historic Inn that I’d worked at for a summer. I couldn’t have planned it better if I had planned it!
At my graduation in Scotland in 1995 I had the good fortune of nearly selling out my degree show, giving me enough cash to make it to Montana. In 1996 we married and rented a small apartment in Bozeman. Without a studio for the first year, I did all of my work on location, sometimes returning to a place five or six days to finish a pastel. In many ways the school of nature was my best training. Over the years I managed to cobble together a career while holding part-time work. Finally in 2004 the pieces were all together; I was able to pursue my art full time. We bought a little house in Livingston, Montana and with more than a little help from friends and family, I remodeled an old dusty alley garage and made it into a charming studio. My commute is now the short walk from the back door of my house to my back yard studio.
Livingston is a fantastic place for an artist. I often walk out of the studio, take one look at the Absaroka Mountains to the south, and load up my field kit. The road south follows the Yellowstone River into Paradise Valley. To the east the Absarokas run uninterrupted to Yellowstone National Park. Steep and dramatic, they are everything mountains aspire to. On the western border the gentler Gallatin Range hides its alpine country behind the sensual contours of sparsely timbered foothills. Seen from above, the river winds south like a silver ribbon, playing hide-and-go-seek with intermittent groves of cottonwoods. This valley holds a lifetime of ideas for an artist.
North of Livingston I follow the Shields River, a small winding river running parallel to the Crazy Mountains. I often drive up old gravel ranch roads toward the mountains. This is austere country, dry empty prairie interspersed with patches of juniper. I love this country for its stark solitude. The mountains form a long island reef rising out of waves of grass. The geographic distinction between mountain and hilly plain is abrupt and absolute. Though a challenge to paint, I feel an artistic kinship to this country. I return often because I want to speak about this place, not because I feel confident to do so.
Even with the plethora of local choices I still get restless; then I travel with the whole family. We camp and I paint early in the mornings and again in the evenings. (If I time it right, I return to camp just as the coffee is brewed and the boys are up!) Usually I reserve the middle of the day to hike and explore with my three boys.
One of my favorite mental images is one of my boys emerging from the studio clutching his paintbrushes and balancing a stack of paint tubs between his left hand and his chin. He’d even managed to put his paint smock on. “I’m ready to go!” he declared. He’d overheard me tell Lynelle that I was heading out to paint on location. What could I do? He was determined to come with. So we all loaded up and drove to a fishing access on the Yellowstone River.
All five of us set up on the banks of the river and painted, even little Isaak. It was about the best day in “the office” that I’ve had.
Sometimes the prospect of painting the landscape seems absurd. Light will always slip through my fingers. Who can comprehend a mountain or explain a river? And yet it all haunts me. Sometimes I get angry. Completing a good painting is like trying to tell a woman that you love her, and it just comes out sounding foolish. Shakespeare would have said it better. . . and then I go out painting on location and watch my friend cheering like a dumb frat boy, and I feel exactly the same. We’re just happy to be here, happy to try to comprehend the mystery that God mixed into all that beauty. Ultimately a sense of gratitude motivates me. We can pad our lives with every comfort and convenience, and still the sun rises and reflects off of rock and snow, floods the valleys and tracks westward. Seasons change with or without witness. I want to be there, to remember and respond.
