It’s a Saturday afternoon in Red Lodge, Montana, and I’m on my fourth cup of coffee as I take my seat in a small room above Black Canyon Bistro. Three songwriters — Montana’s Lena Rich and Tom Catmull, along with Nashville’s Tai Shan — tune...
Montana artist Mike Barlow is enamored with his subject matter. Like many artists, Barlow can be shy when talking about aesthetics. Serious artists, after all, are in the business of making art and are happy to leave judgment regarding its merits to philosophers. But when...
The Northern Rockies remain a treasure trove for artistic talent, with many new and emerging artists hitting their stride. Here are a few artists catching our attention. Amanda Markel Sculptor Amanda Markel takes the fluidity of paint and translates it to bronze. Through the idea of negative...
Growing up in Billings, Meghan Spielman and her sister were encouraged to explore every kind of art. They took classes at the Yellowstone Art Museum, studied watercolor painting during the summers, and were rarely told there was a right or wrong way to create. Today, Spielman’s...
For Brooke Wetzel, experiences in the great outdoors inform her creativity. “We spent a lot of time outside and on the rivers,” she says of her childhood. “It’s where my love of nature came from. I’m a mountain girl. I’ve spent my life in the...
For many viewers, the first thing that emerges when observing a Kenneth Yarus painting isn’t the sheer scale of the mountains, the glint of glacial water, or the depth of the alpine sky. It’s how the piece makes a viewer feel — an emotional resonance....
In a scene pulsing with tense energy, two bison bulls, each weighing as much as a ton, battle for primacy. Amid the clouds of dust they’re kicking up, one of them launches himself from the ground, hindquarters powerfully pushing, forelegs airborne, head and horns lowered....
If you believe, as Picasso did, that “the purpose of art is to wash the dust of daily life off our souls,” or, like Kurt Vonnegut, that art is “a very human way of making life more bearable,” or, as Mary Oliver wrote, that “art...
For the last century, a quintessential Montana artist might have been known for creating traditional images of the wide-open, beautiful vistas and rugged terrain that define the region. Walk into an area gallery, and you’re likely to find oil paintings and watercolors of “big picture”...
In September 1892, artist Henry Herman “H.H.” Cross set up a studio at Marcus Daly’s Montana Hotel in Anaconda. There, Cross spent six months creating paintings of Daly’s racehorses, and on January 16, 1893, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the hotel was “the Mecca...