Page 39 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

The recurrent droughts, the blizzards, the quakes, the notorious Arctic fronts have cleared the high plains of all but the most determined.
Ranchers chip a living out of the depleted soil on its
way towards
desert; artists
hammer a
skyoutofa
Provençal
palette, forge
a winter out of
borrowed fire. Isabelle Johnson did both. And so her colors harbor a harder edge than their cousins
on the palmate French coast. Her trees howl with deprivation, the stronger heirs of St. Rémy orchards limp in the Mediterranean heat. She brought foreign suns to frozen tundra, dichotomies that even now
don’t fit into the easy sweep of the brush, that aren’t natural to the lazy hand of the landscaper.
She muscles the hiker’s eye onto a ridge, a bush, a cow in bursts of light like Vermeer’s, that guide the day into
unnatural balances. She no- tices how boughs interlock in mad scenes
of wind, how cows blend into
bursts of glare bouncing off the hay, how pines, snow, and sandstone, born out of extremes, merge into cozy, controlled patterns on the land.
When you travel outside Fishtail today, you see trac- tors frozen in amber set against the Magritte gray of a supercell sky; you see the campfire marshmallows of mountains superimposed on the pumpkin orange of lost hayfields. You see them because a woman who hayed her father’s ranch, who birthed calves, who shot sick horses also saw something deeper than what
cameras see. Isabelle Johnson saw the future, the industrial mod- ernist palette in fields, flowers, and valleys that even today remain
planted firmly in the agrarian past. But if you look closely, the details
have changed. A lot more is on the breeze and in the leaves, because of Isabelle Johnson.
Tippet Rise is extremely fortunate to have recently been able to purchase the two Isabelle Johnson paint- ings. These two works will be on permanent display in the Olivier Music Hall.
—Portions excerpted from “Photographing Isabelle,” by Peter Halstead in A Lonely Business: Isabelle Johnson’s Montana, Yellowstone Art Museum, 2015.
2018 Summer Season 39