Honor the Earth

Sacred Bison/22x30 inches/Oil and Gold Leaf on PaperPower Image #7-Connection to Ancestors/30x40 inches/OIl on canvas

A decade ago, we followed Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, and the Indigo Girls around Montana for the Honor the Earth Tour. The purpose of those musicians traveling together was to register Native Americans on the Reservations to vote. The Buffalo of Yellowstone were being slaughtered, and the point was to change some opinions in the State Legislature of Montana. It helped but the Buffalo still need support and protection from slaughter. I came home with the music and painted and painted to the double CD until it was scratched. I now have my second copy. The rhythms of the music and the messages transformed my painting. The Power Images that began as moving horses as metaphors for higher power evolved into the connection to ancestors series and that into images of bison. The recently sold charcoal of a resting buffalo references photos of the Yellowstone Bison. They are the remaining herd with a link to the prehistoric bison. I have many full circle moments in my work. Moving from Power Image #7 to the study of cave art to the Legends of Native Americans and now to connection to the only prehistoric mammal still living is a spiral that I am enjoying following. All power is found in circles.

Celebrating Joan Mitchell

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has been posting on Facebook wonderful paintings each day of the month of February to celebrate her birthday. Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was a "second generation" abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. She was an essential member of the American Abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France. A passionate inner vision guided Joan's brush. Like her peer Cy Twombly, she extended the vocabulary of her Abstract Expressionist forebears. She imbued their painterliness with a compositional and chromatic bravery that defiantly alarms us into grasping their beauty. You can read Armantrout Studio Facebook page by clicking the icon under social networks.

Robert Wilson, Clementine Hunter

Visual artist and director, Robert Wilson, is directing a new chamber opera based on the life of artist, Clementine Hunter. Sheryl Sutton says "My character stands to elucidate her spiritual life. She was a painter, but she painted at night, she painted from midnight to 6 in the morning. So everyone knew her as a mother, a cook, a field hand. They knew her in all these worldly ways, but her real life was from midnight to 6 a.m., and she said she painted what God told her to."

William Turnbull 1922-2012

William Turnbull, sculptor and painter, blending primitive and modern forms in highly poetic work, rest in peace.

Will Barnet (1911-2012)

“Realization can only come through relationships,” Will Barnet has said. “Without this most basic concept, all painting falls into a world of illusion and chaos.” Barnet, an art educator and a lifelong champion of the arts, inspired generations of artists and lived long enough to enjoy many honors that most artists receive only posthumously. In 2011, President Obama awarded him the National Medal of the Arts, the highest honor for an individual artist in the United States. Mr. Barnet died of cardiac arrest at an apartment building for artists in Gramercy Park where he had lived for 28 years. He had continued to draw even after turning 100, and four days before his death he visited galleries in Chelsea to see how they were faring after Hurricane Sandy.