Today is National Puppy Day and our puppy thinks she owns the place. She is a year and a half old and still loves getting into trouble. She insists on sleeping in between me and Heidi at night and plops herself down with all her weight on me or Heidi and sometime both of us. But she is so darn cute all the time. I guess we will keep her.
Bannack is ghost town turned state park just west of Dillon Montana. The town is kept up and the public is allowed to go from building to building. The town was a mining town in its heyday and was quite lawless. It eventually had nearly ten thousand people living in and around the town. If you have the chance visit Bannack State Park when they have living history going on. There is cowboys, doctors, miners, saloon girls and more.
It seems both fast and slow the last seven years of attending Utah Valley University pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Some semesters I took 12 credit hours and some only 3. but I have finally finished all the required class to graduate (after this semester of course). I submitted my application to graduate and it was accepted so now I can rule the world.
I had one of those small world moments recently when a friend of mine had a friend who needed to use my studio to print some work for a client. It turned out that she and I were actually in the same printmaking class at Utah Valley University. Her name is Liz Lindsay, a local artist in Provo, and she creates wonderful work. The prints that Liz made were organic, painterly and photographic like a photogram. I really enjoyed learning Liz's printmaking technique and especially loved seeing her create her art right before my eyes.
You can see Liz's work at www.lizlindsayfineart.com
Vacant places are all around us, whether they are abandoned objects, buildings, or entire towns. These castoffs fascinate me as an artist, with the mystery of how or why they were left behind. Who lived there? How long? And why did they leave? I love to go to these places and explore every inch to capture all the nuances they possess. Likewise, I hope that the viewer will look deep into each image and see details that they might not find by quickly glancing and then moving on to the next image. By asking questions, analyzing the images, or basking in the mysterious nature the images reveal, the viewer becomes a contributor in creating both a story and a shared experience.This exhibit is another branch of an ongoing project of mine called Roadside Ruins and Attractions. Instead of using Straight Photography, here I synthesize multiple perspectives of the object or place to create a single unified and abstracted image.
