It’d be difficult to find a piece by Gillette artist Christopher Amend that evinces a single version of reality.
Amend’s “Gorillas and Portals” series, set to go up for exhibition at Scarlow’s Gallery in Casper on Oct. 1, is perhaps his most literal representation of multiple worlds existing in one image, where lifelike Silverback gorillas consider windows into seasons and environments as removed as possible from the tropics.
But they’re just as consistent, even if implied, in his abstract work, where the lines of figures’ bodies dissect the space of the image into halves and quarters.
The series of graphite drawings that will accompany “Gorillas and Portals,” completed this summer, uses those conflicted figures, alongside panels, alleys, arches and windows that create the space for competing realities on either side.
“I’ve always been interested in portals, and windows and sometimes doorways into realities other than our own,” Amend said. “But in fact, every painting is a portal. Every good book is a portal … looking at a drawing, or looking at a painting, or reading a book, you have to excite your own imagination to see into that.”
Amend, who spent about 30 years as an art teacher in the Campbell County School District, said that as an instructor, his philosophy was always to facilitate, not dictate. While technique is important for creating the parameters of art, there’s no one way to utilize them.
“Teaching technique is an essential thing, but it’s not the meat of what you’re trying to teach,” Armend said. “What you’re trying to teach, in my view, is creative thinking and creative expression.”
Confoundingly, he said, those two things are basically impossible to teach from scratch. But they can be facilitated — like a boundary facilitates what it sits against.
Amend maintains that teaching in the public school system had always made him a better artist. His work is evidence of a history of training himself, along with his students, on an emotional inner reality realized on the canvas with unapologetic strangeness.
Since retiring in 2007, his work has retained its surrealist bent, and while that bent has challenged some viewer’s ideas of what it means to have a regional identity in the Cowboy State, its staying power — at 75 years old — is perhaps a tribute to the strength of novelty.
Amend was born in Superior in 1950, six months before his family moved to Worland. His dad was an English teacher “at the beginning and the end of his life,” but worked many jobs in between to support his six children, Amend said.
His interest in drawing began in the first grade. When his teacher had one of her students stand as a real-life model for drawing practice for the rest of the class, she said that Amend was the first student she’d had in decades of teaching who’d tried to draw the girl herself, instead of from the simple formula of shapes children usually use to draw human figures.
“I got a ribbon at the fair (for it), which earned me 50 cents, which was a lot of money as a first grader, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Amend said. “…That sounds like a Norman Rockwell type of story, but that’s the way it happened.”
Amend went from Worland High School to the University of Wyoming, where he also received his M.F.A. In college, he said that he was more interested in etching — which uses acid to transfer a drawn image into a metal plate — but transitioned to drawing in grad school.
He soon realized that teaching at the college level at that time would likely be a pipe dream. Colleges were flooded with M.F.A.s in drawing in the 1970s, he said, and he was out of work after a one-year contract with a college in Ohio ended.
Amend eventually applied to teach in his wife Della’s home town of Gillette. In 1978 — in the midst of one of Gillette’s famous booms — Amend went from teaching college students to instructing elementary school students at Stocktrail Elementary.
“I treated it pretty much the same way that I treated teaching college, more or less the same way, just with different materials and thinking backward to more basic approaches to ideas,” Amend said. “…In elementary I worked along with them with the same materials they were using.”
His methods were the same when he transitioned to teaching at Campbell County High School five years later. For 24 years, he treated secondary-level art instruction as an artists’ residency, he said, with a commitment to working alongside his students.
“Something I decided early on was that I would not pose a problem for my students that I hadn’t tried to solve myself, or that I wasn’t willing to try to solve along with them,” Amend said.
Those problems were both technical and abstract — no less than the process of melding the “emotional” and “narrative” ideas they were dealing with the compositional ideas on the page.
Amend remembered exercises calibrated to train both skills: both literal self-portraits from mirrors as well as symbolic self-portraits. He’d get them to draw perfect circles free-hand — with the caveat that perfect is a relative term — to train them to pay close attention to the process of drawing, which is vital to the process of drawing from a model.
Students tended to hate the perfect circle exercise, he said, but it was a means to an end: Amend said that, in his view, if he was doing his job correctly, his presence in the classroom became “superfluous,” and that if at the end of two semesters he’d created a room full of students who drew exactly like him, he’d failed.
“A big part, especially of when I went along in my teaching career, was that I understood more and more than what I wanted to get across is that art could be a voice, and it could be a very individual voice,” Amend said. “That was the value of it for each kid.”
Amend said that the students who’d come out of his classes over the past thirty years have made their own way in the world as creatives in several different ways: as artists making a living from their work alone, tattooists and fellow arts educators.
In the 1990s, Amend began a transition into using color that’s culminated in the practice of combining realism with hyper-varied, brilliant shades.
One pivotal piece from 1994, “Death, Beggar, Fish, Angel,” was created in pink and other light colored pencils, with big sweeping arches and elements of realism used to create the four figures — it’s a piece about redemption, he said, inspired by his divorce from the church he had grown up in.
Paintings with his kids and grandkids where they double or triple, appear in small envelopes of other realities and play in the highly pigmented worlds he’s created for them are hung throughout his and Della’s home. Since Amend’s retirement, his work has gotten less abstract, but no less challenging: The “Gorillas and Portals” series started in 2011, but reached full force in 2022.
His surrealist bent has, in some minds, put him at odds with the identity of a “Wyoming artist.”
After a presentation at an arts conference in Cody several years ago, he remembers sitting at a bar with a man on the Cody Arts Council at the time, dressed in a cowboy hat and a business suit.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re not really a Wyoming artist.’ I said, ‘I was born in Wyoming. I was educated in Wyoming. I’ve lived all but four years of my entire life in Wyoming. Who do you think is a Wyoming artist?’” Amend said.
The man replied with two famous cowboy illustrations: James Bama and Frederic Remington. Both artists, Amend said, were born in New York.
“I said, ‘You know who was a Wyoming native, born in Cody, actually? Jackson Pollock,’” Amend said.
For Amend, those conversations seemed to be symbolic of an idea of Wyomingites and the limits of their creativity that even believers in Wyoming art themselves are fond of perpetuating: not only that Wyoming has only ever looked one way, but that the state’s residents themselves have no artistic vision separate from those mythic frontier figures.
“That idea that everyone in Wyoming has to have a certain mindset, and a certain kind of imagery and so on, or you’re not really a Wyoming artist that, I think that’s offensive, not just to artists, but to everyone else,” Amend said. “It’s to assume that no one in Wyoming has an inner life, or a philosophy that goes beyond just your place and time. I think that’s insulting.”
Visitors who see Amend’s work in Casper in October may not find the label intuitive for Amend, but that may be not only a good thing, but a hard-won aspect of Amend’s work: to see the act of contemplating another reality as generative.