Wildlife Artist Dawn Senior-Trask of Moonhorse Art Studio
1-307-327-5381

articles

Dawn Senior's Woodcuts: Visions of the Lakota Calendar

By Fran Fisher, Saratoga Sun

Dawn Senior, maker of woodcuts, is an artist who affords us opportunity for seeing further, for sharing experience, for adding to understanding, and opening windows in the closed houses of our individual perceptions.

With tools of knife and board and a variety of softly-colored inks, she creates visions on paper, her illusions helping to confront the problems of pavement and spaciousness, of past primitive against present imperative that occupy all of us who would like to be free spirits in a free land.

Sharing her ability through an exhibit, Senior displays the careful, painstaking skills that have given her recognition throughout the state.  Prizes include a clean sweep of the first three places of the graphics division in the Audubon Wildlife Art Show in Lander.  The winning pieces are part of an as-yet-incomplete series of woodcuts based on Senior's work on several Lakota reservations in South Dakota.  The three pieces exhibited are named for months of the Lakota calendar.

June, in Lakota lore, is called the Moon of Fatness, as is Senior's second-place winner, a woodcut reflecting the abundance of summer, the fattening of the buffalo on green grass.  The piece is bordered with tall, stylized green plants.  Above, a mystical family of buffalo makes its way from left to right, with cavorting youngsters symbolizing the renewal of the summer season.  Below, a small and perfect turtle makes its way into a maze-like series of lines reflecting the design of its shell.  The center section of the work is another maze, reddish-brown lines like shadows on running river water.  From this surface, a buffalo begins to emerge, pure white, its head and hump looming out of the picture, eyes and face still hidden in textured camouflage, an animal which can be seen, but cannot yet see back.

July, the Moon of Red Chokecherries, brought Senior a third-place ribbon.  Her re-creation of the moment is clean and spare.  Lines cut across the center section representing a steep, windswept rock formation which supports a dark mountain lion, its sleek predatory shape a dark inking of the color that creates the rock, aubergine, maroon, a line of carmine the color of chokecherry juice pressed out against a hard surface.  To the panther's right, a golden moon, large against the closeness of the earth, lights the white panel.

Moon of Black Chokecherries,  Senior's first-place winner, is a special work, the special magic of dimension represented here by the intersection of two planes, two perceptions of the same moment.  The high plains background, green and vegetal, is seen straight on, as if the viewer lay on windswept ground, looking at the sparse plants from the perspective of the prairie dogs which inhabit the left-hand corner.  Repetitive, like ancient wallpaper, the design of the background brings the picture a sense of familiarity which draws the viewer into the landscape.  Purely Wyoming in feeling, the perspective of the ground dweller is traded in the upper right for that of a hunting hawk, wings closing for a dive above a band of antelope.  The antelopes' sleek fullness curves graceful between hunter and prey, holding in their action a small group of bluebirds, as purely surprising on paper as their unexpected color is on the wide plains of our mutual homeland. 

Senior's  work is fully deserving of the recognition bestowed upon it.  Her beautiful woodcuts are well worth a visit, her indigenous art a way of making each of us revisit the landscape in which we spend our time, with eyes reopened, windows freshly washed.

If you would like more information on our artwork or would like to place an order, email Moonhorse Art Studio or call us 307.327.5381. We look forward to hearing from you!