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Summer 2006 | Volume 29, Number 3 | Features

Response Art Work

Montana Ranch I:
Nevada Creek Ridge
2002
Acrylic on Paper
17" x 8"

Michael Caldwell
SPU Professor Emeritus of Art

Ten miles east of Ovando, a small town in westcentral Montana, lies this placid prairie scene, give or take a few trees and clouds. “The title of the painting refers to a nearby creek,” says just-retired Seattle Pacific University Professor of Art Michael Caldwell. “But it may be that I invented the name of the mountain range.”

When you’re a painter, you get to do that. You also get to change the world, as it were. Caldwell has painted the scene often, changing it each time. “Sometimes there’s more space at the bottom,” he explains. “Sometimes I bring trees in from other places. Once, I put in a little creek.” Pointing to this painting, he says, “Those clouds weren’t there. I brought them in from someplace else. I removed some trees here and there, and there were a couple of buildings in the foreground.”

A longtime devotee of Big Sky Country and the American West, Caldwell has visited this particular Montana landscape many times. “I don’t recall what it was that first attracted me to it,” he says. “Maybe it was just the fact that it is a prairie, flatlike, and then these two hills stood out, and as you move to the right there’s a big gap and another set of mountains starts, so you can see out through the gap.” He pauses, then continues. “The colors, and the way the trees help define the shape of the mountains, also attracted me.”

The artist created the painting, which was sold last year to a private collector, in his Seattle studio from photographs. “It’s not unlike the way landscape paintings were done in the 19th century prior to the Impressionists,” Caldwell, ever the teacher, explains. “The Impressionists were really the first people to go outdoors and actually finish works of art outside.”

After 36 years at Seattle Pacific, Caldwell retired in June 2006 (click here for the story). He has moved with his wife, Vicki, to their home outside Winthrop, Washington, where he will continue to paint, among other things, his vision of the great American West.

 

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My Response
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