Show celebrates key corridor for wildlife

8 - STEPPING OUT Jackson Hole News&Guide, Wednesday, May 18, 2011
The “Yellowstone to Yukon” show features many originals, like Carl Rungius’ “Moose, Upper Ram River Valley.”
Show celebrates key corridor for wildlife
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Who: National Museum of Wildlife Art,
Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies,
Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative
What: ‘Yellowstone to Yukon: the Journey of
Wildlife and Art’
When: Summer Exhibitions Reception, 5:30-8
p.m. May 25; exhibit hangs until Aug. 14
Where: National Museum of Wildlife Art
How much: Museum admission; free today for
Art Museum Day
Web: WildlifeArt.org, Whyte.org, Y2Y.net
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See for free
Enjoy the National Museum of Wildlife
Art’s new summer suite of exhibitions for
free today as part of Art Museum Day,
an international day, spearheaded by the
Association of Art Museum Directors, to
emphasize the enduring impact of art
museums on their communities.
By Katy Niner
Wildlife master Carl Rungius explored much of western North America in pursuit of his art, and in so
doing built an incomparable compendium on canvas of the animals and
habitats of the region.
Following in his intrepid footsteps, Dwayne Harty covered much
of the same territory — from Cora to
the Arctic Circle — with the mission
of communicating through his art
the importance of protecting pristine places.
He spent a month horsepacking in
the rugged Muskwa-Kechika region.
He helicoptered to the top of the Ram
Plateau and rafted down 150 miles of
the Nahanni River. All in the name
of collecting material for the conservation story he was commissioned to
tell by painting the animals and the
habitats of the 2,000-mile-long Yellowstone to Yukon corridor.
Just as Thomas Moran’s art helped
pave the way for the national parks
in the 19th century, the Yellowstone
to Yukon Conservation Initiative,
aka Y2Y, hopes Harty’s paintings will
now raise awareness of the need to
protect the connectivity of the continental corridor.
Dwayne Harty echoes many of Rungius’ locations in his recent works,
including “Dall Sheep, Gates of the Nahanni River, North West Territory.”
Because his paintings capture the
scope and beauty of the vast region,
viewers leave with a greater understanding and urgency to protect it for
the sake of wildlife.
“Yellowstone to Yukon: The Journey of Wildlife and Art” explores the
sweeping relationship between the
art and the conservation of the region
by drawing upon the collections of
both the National Museum of Wildlife
Art and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta.
Beyond the 26 paintings by Harty,
the show features 76 works total,
all set in the region, all starring its
wide cast of wildlife. Other artists
showcased include Albert Bierstadt,
Moran, Bob Kuhn, Robert Bateman,
Nancy Glazier and, of course, Rungius. On exhibit through Aug. 14, “Yellowstone to Yukon” will be celebrated
at the Summer Exhibitions Reception
on May 25. After its Jackson run, the
show travels to Banff for installation
next summer at the Whyte Museum.
The exhibition is divided into seven
regions. In addition to the extensive
descriptions of each work, each region
is equipped with an iPad packed with
additional information, including videos, interviews and images of Harty’s
plein air paintings.
By tapping both museums’ collec-
tions, the exhibition offers a rare,
sweeping look at the habitat stretching between here and the Yukon, said
Adam Harris, curator of the wildlife
art museum. To Jackson, the Whyte
sent “Lake McArthur” by Rungius, a
seminal piece that has not been seen
in the U.S. since it won the Carnegie
Prize in 1925 (for which it nabbed the
cover of the New York Times).
The prestigious accolade established Rungius’ career. Since then, it
has been in a private collection in Hawaii and then the Whyte Museum.
The exhibit also speaks to the enduring profundity of majestic landscapes on conservation awareness.
“Why were these artists drawn to
these places?” Harris asked. “For the
same reasons we are: They are gorgeous, pristine.”
Thankfully, they have received
some degree of protection so that even
today, an artist like Harty could venture and find untouched expanses.
“When you don’t see a jet contrail
for weeks, it’s an amazing thing,”
Harty said. “The lack of presence and
contact is wonderful.”
The project began more than eight
years ago when Harvey Locke, an internationally renowned conservationist who founded Y2Y and is now its
strategic advisor, pitched it to Harty
See KEY CORRIDOR on 9
STEPPING OUT Jackson Hole News&Guide, Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - 9
Rungius etchings hang together for first time
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Who: Renowned wildlife artist Carl Rungius
What: ‘Above Timberline’ exhibit of etchings
When: Through Oct. 2
Where: National Museum of Wildlife Art
How much: Museum admission
Web: WildlifeArt.org
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By Richard Anderson
From 1894 until his death in 1959, painter
Carl Rungius lived two lives.
In the summers, he traveled west to the Rockies — to Wyoming’s Wind River Range for a decade and then, starting around 1910, to the high
peaks around Banff, Alberta. He would spend
weeks at a time alone in the high country, hunting, photographing, sketching and painting small
oil studies.
At the end of each summer, he would pack the
season’s work up and transport it back to his
studio in New York. There, he would spend the
rest of the year turning the sketches and studies
into full-scale paintings, more than two dozen of
which are in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art.
Between 1925 and 1938, however, Rungius
turned his mind and talents to another outlet:
drypoint etching.
“He got into it,” said Adam Harris, curator at
the wildlife art museum. “It was an intriguing activity for him for more than 10 years.”
He also got quite good at it, as the museum’s
new display of 48 Rungius etchings demonstrates.
“Above Timberline: Engravings by Carl Rungius” opened May 7 in the Kuhn Gallery. Some of
these images will be familiar to museum regulars.
Many have been shown before, hanging in rotation in various displays and galleries. Others will
be recognizable because the original oil paintings
from which Rungius made the plates hang just
across the hallway in the Rungius Gallery.
However, the entire collection — the 46 etchings he released and sold in limited editions of
100 or so, plus two that were not produced for sale
— has never hung all together in the museum.
To make these prints, Rungius first created
a copy of a painting, in which he had already
worked out the many compositional issues he
tended to fuss over. Using a photo of a painting,
he would trace the main details of the work onto
a piece of paper.
He then would transfer this image onto a copper plate covered with an acid-resistant chemical. Drawing on the plate with a needle, he would
scrape the chemical away; when the plate was
dipped in acid, the acid would create features
that would hold ink in the press.
Rungius also used a drypoint needle on the
plates. While the acid-etched lines resulted in
deep, bold strokes, the drypoint needlework allowed him to add shading and softer features.
KEY CORRIDOR
Continued from 8
after a lecture the artist had given at
the University of Montana.
“It seemed pretty wild when I first
thought about it,” Harty said. “I had
never heard of Y2Y. The whole concept was so large.”
After many conversations over the
course of a year, Harty agreed to embark on the project: He believed in
Y2Y’s mission — to preserve the connectivity of the corridor spanning the
two countries — and in Locke’s ability to pull off the ambitious project,
as well as his affinity for art.
“Harvey had a great vision of how
all the pieces needed to knit together,” Harty said.
Harty sought financial support
from several of his collectors, and
within months of securing funds,
he hit the road with an itinerary
mapped out by Locke, a native of the
Calgary-Banff area. Just as Rungius did on his first journey West from
New York, Harty began in Cora.
From there, he flew to British Columbia, where he saw an astounding amount of wildlife, including 13
grizzlies and five wolverines.
On rest days from riding, Harty
would paint.
“I had read about how Rungius
“Above Timberline: Engravings by Carl Rungius” features 46 etchings the artist released and sold plus
two that were not produced for sale. Rungius focused on drypoint etching between 1925 and 1938. “He
got into it,” Adam Harris, the museum’s curator, said.
Often, the artist would make several passes at
the plate, both with the acid bath and the drypoint needle, until he was satisfied with the result. In two cases, the museum has examples of
prints from early plates and prints of final plates.
These prints also are notable in that they are
moose “portraits,” depicting two different bulls
from the neck up, as opposed to wildlife in a natural setting.
Taken together in one room, the collection offers a handy way to see how Rungius developed
as an artist over the decade in question. The earliest prints, like his early painting, tend to render
the landscape in less detail, offering sketchy outlines of the terrain, and left a lot of white space.
Later, however, he filled in a lot more of the
context, giving the rocks and roots, trees and topography as much mass and form as he gave the
creatures. Harris suggested Rungius grew more
comfortable with the technique and more confident, inspiring him to use bigger plates and fill-
would do these trips and how much
time he spent at an alpine level,” he
said. “I gained a new respect for how
tough an individual he was.”
“I believe if we don’t
conserve or preserve
wildlife places in
perpetuity, we diminish
part of our ability
to be fully human.”
– Dwayne Harty
ARTIST
With Steve Duerr of The Murie
Center, Harty ventured into the Wind
River Range to find the exact spot
above New Fork Lakes where Rungius painted “Wind River Bugler.”
South of Jasper, he pulled off the
highway to hike a butte that Rungius
used to climb, a spot where he found a
band of rams.
The scene he found at the Peace
River differed greatly from the graceful waterway Rungius had painted,
there no more. A dam had spread the
river into a lake.
Each painting features a location
ing them with more detail.
And what mass and form he was able to
achieve: His animals have a marvelously individuality, and he shows them in natural settings
and poses that were not the norm for wildlife art
in the early 1900s.
Bighorn sheep glare from their pebbly perch
just below the summit of a peak. A grizzly bear
ambles out of a canyon. A deer leaps nimbly over
a fallen log. Several prints depict caribou — a
subject Rungius loved, Harris said, for their distinctively pattered black-and-white hides — and
there are plenty of moose, his favorite.
One rare print includes something not often
seen in a Rungius work: a human being, in fact
none other than Rungius himself, leading a train
of pack horses around a bend high up on the side
of a mountain.
“Above Timberline” remains on display until
Oct. 2. For information, visit www.wildlifeart.org
or call 733-5771.
and species selected for its conservation resonance as a species or site.
Conservation issues led him to Buck
Pond Lake on the border of Idaho
and British Columbia to see clouds
of migratory fowl. And to Waterton
Lakes Park in Alberta — the first
international peace park, an important cog for Y2Y — and to Antelope
Flats to see pronghorn.
“I believe if we don’t conserve or
preserve wild places in perpetuity,
we diminish part of our ability to be
fully human,” Harty said. “Nature is
a touchstone of life, whether we get
out into it frequently or not. It’s part
of being human.”
Harty’s paintings introduce Jackson Hole eyes to new species, like
Canada’s wood bison, a massive relative to the valley’s comparatively
petite plains variety.
All told, Harty spent three summers tracing the Yellowstone to Yukon
corridor three times, and built an image collection some 110 DVDs deep,
with each disc holding 1,200 images.
After such an intense period of
collection, Harty turned his focus to
painting and moved last fall to Jackson to become an artist-in-residence
at the Murie Center.
He has spent the last year painting in a Center for the Arts studio. He
arrived in Jackson with three of 30
paintings done.
Summer celebration
On May 25, the museum hosts a Summer Exhibitions Reception for all of its summer shows. The evening is free for members and $12 for others. Doors open at 5:30
p.m. with light hors d’oeuvres and a cash
bar. At 7 p.m. Harvey Locke of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative will
give a presentation. Also attending: artist
Dwayne Harty and Dale Eisler, Consulate
General of Canada in Denver.
As part of the festivities, the museum will
announce the winner of its Bull-Bransom
Award, which recognizes children’s book
illustration depicting nature and wildlife.
The evening ends at 8 p.m.
Beyond finishing the full Y2Y suite,
he has also completed two small canvases and the 2012 Fall Arts Festival
poster painting.
Harty had visited Jackson Hole
before to participate in the wildlife
art museum’s Western Visions Miniatures and More Show and Sale.
He hopes to stay in Jackson after his
residency.
Harty feels transformed by his
Yellowstone to Yukon experience. “It
changed me,” he said. “To visit true,
untouched, pristine wilderness —
the burden of responsibility to translate those feelings was piqued.”