Wyoming Arts Council

Moonrise Kingdom: Two Laramie artists find inspiration on the Red Desert

Featured News | October 29, 2015

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Story by Melodie Edwards on the Wyoming Public Radio web site (podcast also available):

When you think of Wyoming landscape art, it’s probably not of fracking sites or abandoned man camps. But two Laramie artists feel it’s time to take a hard look at all of Wyoming’s landscapes. My artist husband and I decided to camp out with painter Pat Kikut and mixed media installation artist David Jones at their desert studio, somewhere north of Wamsutter.

To get there, we drove through miles of gas fields and I wondered, how did they even discover this spot? Jones and Kikut say they came exploring the area for a project for the Berry Biodiversity Center at the University of Wyoming.

“That was three years ago and there were grants that were combining biodiversity and art. And so we had this idea of exploring life zones of the Red Desert.”

Driving the miles of oil and gas roads north of Rawlins, they found an oasis.

“It’s funny,” Kikut says, laughing, “we were looking for habitat, we found habitat and now we’ve created habitat. Including horseshoe pits.”

Read the rest: http://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/refusing-turn-blind-eye-red-desert-two-artists-set-studio-near-gas-field

On the home page: Patrick Kikut paints another moonrise on the Red Desert.

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