Clint Loomis Studio - Artist's Notes

I was born in a small town outside of Chicago in 1949. My father was a newspaperman and my mother an opera singer. We moved into the heart of the city when I was in the fourth grade and stayed through my high school years. This move had a deep impact on my work as did the four years my sister and I lived in Europe while my mother was performing.

I attended Northern Illinois University from which I received both my Bachelor and Masters of Fine Arts Degrees. I was extremely fortunate to study for six years with one of America’s foremost painters, Robert Kabak.

In between undergraduate and graduate school, I received a grant at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, an artist colony, in Taos, New Mexico. I spent six months painting the landscape of the Southwest, overwhelmed by its beauty, and knowing that I would return to the Rocky Mountains as soon as an opportunity presented itself. Upon graduating from N.I.U. in 1972, I moved west permanently – first to Idaho and then to Montana where I’ve lived for the past thirty years and maintained a working studio. I have taught art in the public schools, for the adult community, and at the college level and have presented workshops for the State Teachers Association.

Much of my work explores spatial relationships and color. A single painting may contain multiple views of an area, going from up close detail to vast distances. To me this is much like what occurs as people view their daily experiences. We focus on a detail and then look out more broadly over the richness of our environment. The multiple perspective is influenced by the works of 15th and 16th century Northern European painters such as Van Eyck and Pieter Breugel. Other historical influences on my work have included the American Luninist painter Martin Johnson Heade and the works of later artists such as Edgar Degas, Charles Scheeler and Edward Hooper.

For many years, I have used individual panels within a work as a means of exploring variations on a theme. I consider each view similar to a stanza of a poem – a thought imbedded in and supporting the integrity of the whole piece. Hence the name of the website: "Visual Poetry".

Colors, the flow of lines, and the repetitive echo of shapes have provided the formal transitions between the panels. It has been interesting to find ways of merging different views within the paintings so as to leave the impression that of course, this is the natural way the scene would be viewed.

I began my career working with oil paints and doing a lot of intense black and white charcoal drawing, but since the 80s have worked primarily with the mediums of water color, gouache, ink, pastels, and colored pencils. The paintings combine the materials through a layering process, which allows the work to achieve what I hope, for the viewer, is an expressive richness and keeps me intrigued and challenged in its creation.

For more information contact:
Clint Loomis Fine Art Studio
www.cloomisstudio.com
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406.535.7380 or 406.366.3068