Stevensville artist Bobbie McKibbin is one of “fourteen of the nation’s best artists” who have been invited to paint “en plein air” (outside on-site) for four days in various locations throughout Yellowstone Park as a participant in the first annual Yellowstone Plein Air Invitational.
The prestigious invitational celebrates the current and historical presence of art in Yellowstone and park visitors will have the opportunity to attend daily painting demonstrations and a paint-out that gathers all artists to paint in one location on Saturday, September 29. A selection of the artists’ “wet paintings” produced during the week will be displayed alongside studio-produced pieces at the Old Faithful Lodge Recreation Hall. These pieces will be available for viewing and purchase on Sunday, September 30. Proceeds from the event benefit Yellowstone National Park priority projects and education initiatives.
McKibbin is excited about the event. She has had a special fascination with Yellowstone Park since her childhood. It began, she said, when she was a child “living in the wilds of North Philadelphia.” Her brother Alex had a contraption called a View Master in which you could insert discs to display images in three dimensions and vivid color. Yellowstone was a significant portion of his collection.
“I was smitten. So incredible,” said McKibbin. “Did this place actually exist? How could this be? Really?!” She said that type of reaction has a long history.
“First accounts from Yellowstone were scoffed at and not taken seriously,” she said. “It took Ferdinand Hayden and Thomas Morton to make the fantastic real.”
McKibbin’s first actual trip to the park was in 1996 while on sabbatical from her teaching responsibilities at Grinell College.
“It was an experience I will never forget,” she said. “The earth was so alive – hissing, spewing, bubbling and belching. Around the thermals the colors were so intense and bold. This was no field of corn back in Iowa.” She said, “capturing this dynamism, bottling this magic – that is the challenge.”
“If I could only work from one location forever, it would be Yellowstone,” said McKibbin.
McKibbin has picked out three of her pastel paintings done in Yellowstone to take with her to the invitational. Portraits and even paintings with human figures in them are rare in her repertoire. Landscapes without people are her forte. Whether it is the back alleys of North Philadelphia, or the cornfields of Iowa, or the hot pools of Yellowstone, McKibbin’s work puts you on the spot, on some select site and shows it to you in a unique fashion.
If you stand up close, very close, to one of her paintings, all you see are dashes and splotches of color. But if you stand further back, it will suddenly congeal into a landscape, but one that shimmers with life. Her work really gets you to looking at things in a new way.
But McKibbin explains it all a little better.
“I try to bring about a sense of balance and harmony in my image making and to faithfully record a sense of place without sacrificing the overall integrity of the image,” says McKibbin. “My mark making leaves a record of my activity and search. Light, time and atmospheric conditions are very important elements and viewing my work from various distances affects the interpretation and response considerably. From across a gallery, light, atmosphere and overall design dominate. At a much closer range, the handwriting and personal shorthand take center stage. It is my hope that as a result of studying my images, you will view your world with a keener and sharper vision.”
After a rewarding career teaching art at Grinnell College in Iowa, Bobbie retired in 2007 and settled into her Drawn West Studio at the mouth of Kootenai Canyon. She says of her own work that “it is shaped by living and working in the West and by an immersion in the works of such writers as Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, William Kittredge and many others. I see myself as a kind of reporter, someone who documents, a witness to the mystery and beauty that surrounds us. My work faithfully records a sense of place and at the same time celebrates the act of drawing and image making.”
Her work, which includes old barns, piles of hay bales, and country lanes, as well as spectacular canyons, can be seen at her Drawn West Studio on Kootenai Creek Road west of Stevensville. It’s worth seeing. Call 777-3226 for an appointment or email mckibbin@grinnell.edu or visit www.bobbiemckibbin.com. Of course, she will be in Yellowstone for the rest of September.