2023 Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center Art Residency

The very first painting I completed during my residency, this was the view from my studio space. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was looking at was one of the habitat types found in the Centennial Valley: sandhills.

In the afternoon sun they would glow with a green-golden color. So beautiful.

I later got to explore some of this habitat and met wildflowers, antelope, and all sorts of birds.

From my studio, these hills stood about 14 miles away. Taking brush and pigment to paper to capture the essence of distance and vastness is no easy task. As an artist, I can add or omit elements in any landscape painting to create a sense of depth and, therefore, a better composition (theoretically).

In this case, however, it was the shapes and colors as they existed, without anything disrupting the open view across a 14-mile span, that caught my attention.

A better composition may have been attainable, but I got lost in the golden yellows and golden greens, the smooth shapes of the sandhills, and the “big sky” that Montana is known for.

Centennial Sandhills Preserve
Watercolor
11x15” (unframed)