Bozeman Magazine

To make a prairie (1855) Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee. And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. "A couple of years ago I painted a small vignette of a solitary woman standing with a shovel in a vast, flat field. While technically unambitious and hastily painted, this image, in all its brevity was my first successful painting. “Field Waltz” became a marker for the direction my work would take since. My inaugural solo exhibition “To Make a Prairie” is an expanse on that scene.  The show is a collection of quiet figures in the landscape, timeless in theme and palette. With their visual austerity, each painting is designed for a noted emotional resonance. Inspired greatly by realist artists such as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, these paintings mark a compulsion for delineating the vertical of the individual against the horizon of the landscape. I believe there can be found the iconography of the mother and child, or of the father, the farmer and the boy. They are a tribute to the power of story found in the landscape of the West, a stage for narratives of life, death, and what happens in between."  - Morgan Irons