Wildlife Artist Dawn Senior-Trask of Moonhorse Art Studio
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Looking For the Extraordinary

By Janet Porter, Saratoga Sun, July 21, 2004

When Dawn Senior-Trask teaches as an artist-in-schools, she tells her students to look for the extraordinary in the “ordinary.”

When teaching writing, she asks them to “write as if for someone who hasn’t experienced what you have experienced.” She might give them an example like snow, and she relates her experience with a professor from Somalia who saw his first snow when visiting Wyoming. Senior-Trask said she handed the professor a snowball and he threw it down in surprise. He hadn’t expected the coldness.

Encampment artist Senior-Trask follows her own advice. Her art is an expression of what she has experienced in life, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and using details that share what she has experienced.

Senior-Trask has experienced a life that isn’t ordinary by most standards. But she said that no one’s life is completely ordinary.

Growing up in a houseful of artists surrounded by works of art, she has spent her life observing the smallest details and paints, sculpts and writes from those observations.

Senior-Trask was taught by her father, Willoughby Senior, a painter whose portraits were especially stunning, she said. He was also a writer who wrote about his ten years living among the Hopi and Navajo tribes of Arizona.

Her paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts have sold worldwide. Her poems and stories have been published in several anthologies and collections. She has also illustrated books of poetry and paints on commission.

Currently, Senior-Trask said she is working on a series of “quilt” oil paintings. She likes to work with oils in the summer when she can be outdoors or indoors with the windows open. She has already completed three or four in the series which feature Wyoming nature.

A new bronze vase will be finished in about two weeks, she said. It is part of her wildflower series and features edible plants, insects and a tiny desert toad.

Senior-Trask is also working on a book of poetry. Finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives, one of her series of poems takes inspiration from photos taken in the 1880s that she found in an antique shop. “I don’t know who the people were,” she said, “or where they lived, but because I know Wyoming I plunk them down here.”

Another series for the book is “Poems of the Ordinary.” One poem in the series is “Getting Ready for Work”, where she contrasts her own routine to life in other parts of the world.

Whatever medium in which Senior-Trask is working -- oils, woodcuts, clay or writing -- she knows her subject.

Wildlife and plants are subjects with which she is familiar. “Animals are individuals, just as people are,” she said. “Each has his or her own personality.”

Senior-Trask’s love and knowledge of individual animals and plants is evident in the intricate detail given to her work.

At the recent Festival of the Arts, Senior-Trask demonstrated part of what is involved in bronze-casting, by displaying original clay sculptures, molds that had been made from them, and by working to “chase” (perfect) a wax that had been cast in one of the molds.

Her artwork can be viewed at the Blackhawk Gallery in Saratoga. She said she also expects to have a website up soon.

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!