Just today, I passed by dozens of watercolors on a gallery wall painted by Marsha Karle.  As I joined others in admiring them, I remembered the first time I encountered the artist.  The year was 1988.   Choking woodsmoke filled the year.  Yellowstone National Park had been in flames for weeks.  I was a young journalist, detailed as a correspondent to write about the historic forest fires and Karle had been dispatched up from Denver by the National Park Service to help manage the onslaught of media coverage.

She never mentioned nearly a quarter century ago that she was a painter, and she wasn't then married to the man who would become her husband, the writer-flyfisherman-naturalist Paul Schullery who has done a yeoman's job over the years translating the scientific research happening in Yellowstone so that it can be understood by the lay public.

Not long ago, Karle and Schullery both retired from public service and resettled in Bozeman, Montana about 90 miles away from Yellowstone Park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs.



Readers may wonder:  Why is Wildlife Art Journal based in the relatively small burg of Bozeman far away from the action in say, New York or Los Angeles?

The first part of the answer is that we, the editorial staff, live here, by choice, having moved to the northern Rockies from other cities.  The second reason is that the wildest wildlands in the Lower 48 states are nearby, drawing artists from around the world on vacation and inspiring many to take up residence.  This region of the U.S. has a remarkably robust arts community, with several world-class museums in the area and towns with thriving gallery scenes.

The final part of the answer pertains to the shifting nature of media itself.  It is no longer necessary to have an office, if you are an art magazine, situated in a skyscraper in New York or LA (or even the suburbs of a city) surrounded by glass canyons and not the real kind.  We can cover as much ground from here as from there. 

Plus, when you happen to find yourself in Bozeman and stop by and allow us to buy you a cup of coffee, you'll understand.

Every once in a while, in addition to reading stories from the centers of the art world, you'll be hearing about local artists in the Rockies (the iconic mountains stretching from the Canadian north to the desert Southwest) and indeed we have an impressive cluster of painters, sculptors, photographers and filmmakers in the neighborhood.
 
I had the occasion this spring of seeing more than 70 new watercolors by Karle featuring landscapes, wildlife and botanicals inspired by the environs of Glacier National Park now celebrating its 100th birthday.  Like her husband, Schullery,  Karle, too, is a gifted translator, not of words but of visual beauty.

Through the end of July 2010, Karle's works, large and small, many of which served as illustration for the couple's new book, This High, Wild Country: A Celebration of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park  are on display at the Bozeman Public Library's Atrium Gallery.   If one is heading to Yellowstone and passing through Bozeman, it is well worth a pit stop at 626 East Main Street.



All of us tend to think of protected nature as being impermanent, but here's a fact:  The eponymous glaciers of Glacier National Park (such as those visible in Karle's scene from Upper Grinnell Lake, above) are melting and vanishing from a warming climate.  Within a few decades, most if not all will be gone.  Those fields of ice are also harbingers for the animals and plants that Karle celebrates in her showing.

If one wonders:  "Is there life after government service?", Karle provides a declarative answer.   There can no doubt that she is in the midst of the most inspiring phase of her life and this portfolio marks her formal arrival as an artist.  She also will be making her inaugural appearance at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's 35th Birds in Art show.  Congratulations, Marsha Karle.  A generation has passed since that smokey summer in Yellowstone.  Your work reminds us why we think of our national parks as crown jewels.