Artist and People Profiles
Western Art & Architecture
"Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly “creates his own weather,” one journalist quips. What Chihuly precipitates is a deluge of shapes, forms and colors — organic, telluric, kaleidoscopic. Think Dr. Seuss in the garden on acid. Think Matisse meets Pollack meets Christo meets Warhol. There are the famously Slumped Baskets, petted by gravity; and the monstrous chandeliers, giant crystal- line constructions weighing up to 2,500 pounds with hundreds of individual glass elements twisting and turning, reminiscent of the tangled hair of Medusa. There are his enormous Floats, glass orbs blown as large as beach balls and technically the most difficult of his creations; not to mention the seductive and biomorphic Sea Forms; or the Ikebana Series, arranging themselves like Technicolor mega-fauna out of the Venetian Series, vases of exuberant if not improbable beauty."
Western Art & Architecture
At one point Hansen held up his index fingers, spacing them about a foot apart. “If I hold up my two fingers here,” he said, “most people see here’s one finger and here’s another finger, but they won’t see the space in between. My work is all about that kind of stuff, the space between.”
Big Sky Journal
"Attempting to draw, to “record” a landscape is to attempt the meeting between two impossible scales of time: eternity and the fleeting, ungraspable present, both of which are what the landscape continually offer us. It is one of the beguiling paradoxes of nature, as well as what the very best landscape artists are able to portray. In each of McKibbin’s landscapes there is exactly such a moment of time."
Wesern Art & Architecture
"In an historical context, while Paxson was erecting his scaffolding for the capital murals, Picasso was in Paris inventing Cubism, and the contrast in art scenes couldn’t be greater. America, that dangerous and defiant infant, was at the time more of an idea than a nation, a vastness trying to carve out a definition of itself through violence and subjugation. The Western artists were there of course, but not so much as witnesses and recorders, but as ad men promoting a grandiose image of a West that only partially was. Paxson, in essence, was simply playing to the crowd, giving the nascent nation exactly what it was looking for."
Big Sky Journal
"On the corner of Third and Main in the center of Stevensville, Mont., Two Left Feet Dancing Free is stomping a wild jig. He opens the found fender of his mouth in a thin- lipped oval, sucking the summer air into his Mustang lungs. He is near the point of exhaustion, and the look in his ball- bearing eye is of utter self-abandon. Closer to street level his moccasins rust, and his leggings, once part of a Chevy, cover his dented muffler thighs. One of the two license plates riveted to his lion cloth is from 1962, number 35 – 789. It is stamped, “prison made.”
High Desert Journal
"Archaeologists are like five-year-olds: A piece of a puzzle is missing and they send themselves scouring under the furniture to retrieve it. The lost piece can be anything from a tiny fragment of bone or chip of obsidian to – as you will see – a desiccated human turd, and the furniture isn’t simply a plaid Chesterfield with dubious floral pattern, but thousands of pounds and even more years of accumulated dirt and rock, which, according to the rules, can only be removed using a garden trowel and whisk. To make matters worse the missing piece is never lost in Aunt Mary’s living room, but hundreds of miles away in a remote corner of nowhere, an expanse of wilderness and desert chronically exposed to the vicissitudes of loneliness and weather."
Bark Magazine
Author, special canine assistant and “First Dog” of Montana, Jag pricked up his ears at the sound of two sharp whistles from his owner, Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, and stood to attention. Moments before, the three-year-old Border Collie and near-constant companion of the first-term governor had been at his appointed post, nap- ping under the governor’s desk. In what was surely a dream about herding squirrels on the state capitol’s lawn, Jag’s legs twitched and the corner of his mouth rose. Now, recalled from such fantasies, it was time to put his paws to Senate Bill 22