On a Thursday night in early May, there is hardly an empty seat at Bozeman, Montana’s Tune Up Bar. The bustling crowd is largely on the younger side — a snapshot of the growing city’s hipster population — and eagerly awaiting the night’s performers. The...
As a child, Benjamin Walter didn’t spend much time wondering whether he could be an artist when he grew up. He already knew he was one. “My family — we’re all artists or musicians. I have five siblings, and we all paint, make music, or both....
Wyoming landscape painter Jennifer Hoffman watches the light shift across the Jackson Hole Valley each day, waiting for moments that spark her imagination. She moved to the area nearly three decades ago to pursue her interest in landscape painting, and ever since, the region has...
Painter Mike Piggott’s work, like poetry, demands a second look. And even a third. His compressed kinetic energy flattens out across the canvas, conveying calmness, like that before a storm. He kidnaps images, then reunites them like babies switched at birth. In his painting Silence, thin...
Anyone coming face to face with Charles Young, a recent portrait by Idaho-based artist Aaron Hazel, could not doubt that they’ve encountered a formidable man, painted in a bravura style that sets right the subject’s woefully unsung place in American history. Born a slave in...
Stacey Herries makes her art from a sunlit studio on the east side of downtown Bozeman, Montana. The space is large and airy, just steps from yoga studios, breweries, and restaurants. Simply put, it’s prime real estate. “Though I promise you, it wasn’t anything special...
You know, Josh is just different. He’s not painting things. He’s trying, in his own way, to create poetry,” says Bill Rey, owner of Claggett/Rey Gallery in Edwards, Colorado, who waxes poetic himself when describing the work and philosophy of Montana-based artist Josh Elliott. “In...
Intended or not, it’s often the simple moments that paint pictures on our hearts: a casual exchange between friends, the striking call of a loon across a lake, an old barn at dusk, flowers in a pot by the front door, swelling clouds before a...
Carving trenches from ageless grass is a lonely ordeal beneath the far gray. A careless horse will die in a ditch so digging them wide will spare us the grief. We toil in the earth in an aging machine, no less weathered by time than the skull of a steer. Under...
The utter largeness that is the legacy and artistic relevance of the late Jim Harrison seems impossible to contain. His novels, novellas, screenplays, and poetry collections have left a once-in-a-generation mark on the literary landscape. Perhaps equally celebrated (or condemned), his life was lived with...