Melinda Whipplesmith Plank glacier national park, montana
It stays light until 10 o’clock here during the summer, but the time still goes quickly. I try to get out and hike and sketch something new each day, but because of the distances in the park it can be a challenge—for me as a resident artist, and for most other visitors, too. Every day people come to Glacier National Park
and they’re overwhelmed. They feel they have only a day to see the whole thing, and so they rush through and then they try to take a piece of the park with them. Some of them will sneak out a leaf or a flower or a pebble—the other day I actually saw someone rolling a huge rock into his car—but most of the time it means taking little snapshots. Really quickly—drive up, jump out, click-click-click-click-click! Done. But truthfully, the only way that I’ve been able to retain a landscape of this magnitude, something that I can look at later and it will give me a sense of that place, is by stopping to sit and soak it in. In a place like Glacier it’s not diffi- cult to come up with images—you think, that’s a pretty picture, that’s a pretty picture—but it takes time to hear what it’s saying to you, and what you want to say back in return. Being an artist in our society is a very strange thing. When you tell people
you’re an artist, either they’ll say, “Sure, yeah right!” or they’ll say, “Oh, I wish I could draw. I couldn’t even draw a stick figure.” But it’s not about that. I think it’s important for people to open themselves up to the possibility of doing those things—drawing, painting, writing—and just not worrying about it being a masterpiece. That’s what I like about printmaking. There are so many errors involved that
it takes some of the preciousness away from it. You learn at a certain point to throw up your hands and just go with it. Often the things you didn’t plan on turn out to be better than what you had intended. Colors that made you go, yuck! when you first used them, you might look at a week later and really like. There’s this misconception that being an artist is about talent and perfection,
and that’s not it at all. Art is like a sport or any other endeavor: it’s about what you put into it. It’s about taking the time to breathe: to breathe in the experi- ence, and breathe out an expression that’s personal to you.
your donation at work: The Trust for Public Land protects national parks across the country—including Congaree National Park, Glacier National Park, and Weir Farm National Historic Site.
TPL.ORG · 59
e.g. plank
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