It\u2019d be difficult to find a piece by Gillette artist Christopher Amend that evinces a single version of reality.<\/p>\n
Amend\u2019s \u201cGorillas and Portals\u201d series, set to go up for exhibition at Scarlow\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But they\u2019re just as consistent, even if implied, in his abstract work, where the lines of figures\u2019 bodies dissect the space of the image into halves and quarters.<\/p>\n
The series of graphite drawings that will accompany \u201cGorillas and Portals,\u201d completed this summer, uses those conflicted figures, alongside panels, alleys, arches and windows that create the space for competing realities on either side.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in portals, and windows and sometimes doorways into realities other than our own,\u201d Amend said. \u201cBut in fact, every painting is a portal. Every good book is a portal \u2026 looking at a drawing, or looking at a painting, or reading a book, you have to excite your own imagination to see into that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s no one way to utilize them.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeaching technique is an essential thing, but it\u2019s not the meat of what you\u2019re trying to teach,\u201d Armend said. \u201cWhat you\u2019re trying to teach, in my view, is creative thinking and creative expression.\u201d<\/p>\n
Confoundingly, he said, those two things are basically impossible to teach from scratch. But they can be facilitated \u2014 like a boundary facilitates what it sits against.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Since retiring in 2007, his work has retained its surrealist bent, and while that bent has challenged some viewer\u2019s ideas of what it means to have a regional identity in the Cowboy State, its staying power \u2014 at 75 years old \u2014 is perhaps a tribute to the strength of novelty.<\/p>\n
Amend was born in Superior in 1950, six months before his family moved to Worland. His dad was an English teacher \u201cat the beginning and the end of his life,\u201d but worked many jobs in between to support his six children, Amend said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d had in decades of teaching who\u2019d tried to draw the girl herself, instead of from the simple formula of shapes children usually use to draw human figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019s what I wanted to do,\u201d Amend said. \u201c\u2026That sounds like a Norman Rockwell type of story, but that\u2019s the way it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 which uses acid to transfer a drawn image into a metal plate \u2014 but transitioned to drawing in grad school.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Amend eventually applied to teach in his wife Della\u2019s home town of Gillette. In 1978 \u2014 in the midst of one of Gillette\u2019s famous booms \u2014 Amend went from teaching college students to instructing elementary school students at Stocktrail Elementary.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d Amend said. \u201c\u2026In elementary I worked along with them with the same materials they were using.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019 residency, he said, with a commitment to working alongside his students.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething I decided early on was that I would not pose a problem for my students that I hadn\u2019t tried to solve myself, or that I wasn\u2019t willing to try to solve along with them,\u201d Amend said.<\/p>\n
Those problems were both technical and abstract \u2014 no less than the process of melding the \u201cemotional\u201d and \u201cnarrative\u201d ideas they were dealing with the compositional ideas on the page.<\/p>\n
Amend remembered exercises calibrated to train both skills: both literal self-portraits from mirrors as well as symbolic self-portraits. He\u2019d get them to draw perfect circles free-hand \u2014 with the caveat that perfect is a relative term \u2014 to train them to pay close attention to the process of drawing, which is vital to the process of drawing from a model.<\/p>\n
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 \u201csuperfluous,\u201d and that if at the end of two semesters he\u2019d created a room full of students who drew exactly like him, he\u2019d failed.<\/p>\n
\u201cA 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,\u201d Amend said. \u201cThat was the value of it for each kid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amend said that the students who\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
In the 1990s, Amend began a transition into using color that\u2019s culminated in the practice of combining realism with hyper-varied, brilliant shades.<\/p>\n
One pivotal piece from 1994, \u201cDeath, Beggar, Fish, Angel,\u201d was created in pink and other light colored pencils, with big sweeping arches and elements of realism used to create the four figures \u2014 it\u2019s a piece about redemption, he said, inspired by his divorce from the church he had grown up in.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s created for them are hung throughout his and Della\u2019s home. Since Amend\u2019s retirement, his work has gotten less abstract, but no less challenging: The \u201cGorillas and Portals\u201d series started in 2011, but reached full force in 2022.<\/p>\n
His surrealist bent has, in some minds, put him at odds with the identity of a \u201cWyoming artist.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Well, you\u2019re not really a Wyoming artist.\u2019 I said, \u2018I was born in Wyoming. I was educated in Wyoming. I\u2019ve lived all but four years of my entire life in Wyoming. Who do you think is a Wyoming artist?\u2019\u201d Amend said.<\/p>\n
The man replied with two famous cowboy illustrations: James Bama and Frederic Remington. Both artists, Amend said, were born in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018You know who was a Wyoming native, born in Cody, actually? Jackson Pollock,\u2019\u201d Amend said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s residents themselves have no artistic vision separate from those mythic frontier figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat idea that everyone in Wyoming has to have a certain mindset, and a certain kind of imagery and so on, or you\u2019re not really a Wyoming artist that, I think that\u2019s offensive, not just to artists, but to everyone else,\u201d Amend said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s insulting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Visitors who see Amend\u2019s 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\u2019s work: to see the act of contemplating another reality as generative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019d be difficult to find a piece by Gillette artist Christopher Amend that evinces a single version of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":242694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,129418,18302,425,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-242693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-great_read","13":"tag-living","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115239522519703488","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}