“All of us loved this country:the wildly varied landscape, from mountains to deep arroyos and on to the Powder River Breaks; the vast space and far horizons; the way of life; the light on the landscapes...”
Neltje, “North of Crazy”
Artist, writer, and entrepreneur Neltje (1934-2021) sought to share this love of the Wyoming landscape with future generations of artists and writers by creating Jentel, a residency program welcoming and supporting creative discovery, exploration, and contemplation. In September 2021, five months after Neltje’s passing, four visual artists came from all across this country and England to experience the remarkable program that Neltje generously endowed. Bringing different perspectives to converge on one point, they spent a month together on the banks of Piney Creek, backed by a thousand acres of hills and surrounded by 360 degrees of ever-changing sky—enjoying limitless physical and creative space.
“At the end of his book, Le plus beau desert du monde, Philippe Diole, concludes that ‘to go down into the water or to wander in the desert, is to change space,’ and by changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. ‘Neither in the desert nor on the bottom of the sea does one’s spirit remain sealed and indivisible.’ This change of concrete space can no longer be a mere mental operation that could be compared with conscious geometrical relativity. For we do not change place, we change our nature.”(The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard, translation 1964,The Orion Press, Inc., p.204).
Entering this environment together, perceptions shifted and possibilities multiplied as the four artists connected to the Lower Piney Creek Valley. Each responded in their own way to the dramatic landscape, expanding their individual practices while weaving together a supportive and stimulating community. In this exhibition, each artist will show work resulting from their time in this exceptional place—and the works will be in conversation with one another in the gallery, much as the artists were at Jentel.
Colleen Blackard divides her time between Brooklyn, NY and Austin, TX, and creates artwork inspired by the light of theTexas night skies of her youth. Fascinated by the evolving atmosphere that light creates around transient subjects such as storms, nightscapes and other emotionally-charged spaces, she uses a range of media and distinctive application methods to connect external and internal landscapes.Captivated by the wild weather and hills of sage surrounding Jentel, she spent as much time as possible hiking and painting them from life, creating a visual record of her experiences.
Karen Marston, a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY, has been exploring the effects of climate change on natural disasters in her paintings for over ten years. Recent bodies of work have included forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, melting icebergs and bleaching coral. At Jentel she was deeply affected by the sublime power and spectacle of the landscape. She spent the month drawing and painting the terrain, studying and responding to the hill and cloud formations. Her paintings embody Wyoming’s primordial sense of expansive, timeless space while suggesting underlying questions about humanity’s relationship to nature.
Amy Robson is a British/American artist based in London who creates drawings, paintings and animations that consider the individual experience of being in a place-physical and psychological. At Jentel she created boldly coloured paintings and monoprints based on direct observation of the majestic landscape. The work pushes representational boundaries with disjointed pictorial spaces and uncanny abstractions to suggest the uncertainty and strangeness of being alive in the modern world.
Frank Sheehan is an Irish American visual artist whose photographs have been published in Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report & textbooks worldwide. While taking time off from teaching perspective at the New York School of Interior Design his Jentel residency was a surprising catalyst to revisit the landscape genre with a new panoramic watercolor series reflecting the Wyoming countryside.“At Jentel I took to watercolor to reflect the sublimebeauty of the surroundings and by the rapid, intense shifts in temperature, light, shade, and shadow.”
