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paintingsChildhood Quilt - quilt painting
Dawn Senior-Trask, of Moonhorse Art Studio, has worked in a wide variety of
media including charcoal, oil paintings, woodcuts,
gouaches, claybords and
scratchboards. Her artwork, especially her oil paintings, are a unique
way of looking at the memories and culture of the West -- memories
and reflections of the lifestyles this western artist has experienced
during the many years she has lived in a log cabin near Saratoga, Wyoming. 
The third in the “Wyoming Quilt” series of oil paintings, “Childhood Quilt” was painted by Dawn as a gift for her mother’s 80th birthday. Dawn designed it using drawings Dawn had made between the ages of 4 and 19. All of the drawing elements come from a childhood drawing, but Dawn sometimes combined images from several drawings into one “quilt block.” Sometimes modification to the composition was necessary to fit the image into the square format. The quilt painting elements are contemporary, although Dawn used the original colors (when present) as a guide. Dawn also created a small book that contains a reproduction of each “quilt” block, her story and sometimes poem about it, and the original childhood sketches upon which they are based. Dawn’s writings are warm with happy memories of her unusual and wonderful childhood experiences and the deeply satisfying meanings that these hold for her. For example, the first “quilt block” depicts two horses running up a wildflower-covered hillside. Dawn drew these horses at the age of 7, when her father told her hauntingly beautiful stories about Moonhorses. The booklet includes several of her early charcoal sketches of herds of Moonhorses, and her poem “Horse Ghost Falling,” with the childhood sketch of that, very different, horse. The second “quilt block” shows Dawn as a little girl leaping over a fallen log and nearly landing on a badger! This quilt painting is so rich with stories and delight that Dawn’s mother continues to find new surprises in it as she looks at it every day hanging next to her kitchen table. Chickadees, chipmunks and cedars, Dad, deer and ducks, earth, eagles and ermine -- the gophers Dawn has known through their generations; her 7-year-old vision of Happiness Hill; the orphaned hawk she and her family raised; the drawings and poems she created after a memorable winter walk with her brother, Thor. The lamp-lit memory of evenings with her parents, cozy by the woodstove in their cabin, their young porcupine happily munching under the table while Dad wrote, Mother read aloud, and the horse grazed under the stars outside the window. The Hopi kachinas her father had told her stories about from the time she could remember, and which she later saw in real life when her family spent five years among their Navajo and Hopi friends. Journeys and jackrabbits, mountain lions, Navajo sheepherders and canyons; the family’s very own princess, Dawn’s older sister Lenore, always bearing gifts of her love and spirit. A tiny saw-whet owl turning its head upside-down in an effort to focus on Dawn, who watched, utterly charmed. The fleet pronghorn, the expressive porcupine, the simple or decorative cloth from which her mother fashioned the family’s garments. The family’s cowhorse Reverend, an escape artist and itinerant known throughout the local ranch country; the stream providing cool, lush respite from the dry summer hills; huge flakes of snow landing in autumn trees and upon a bear’s back; Twitchy, the wild forest squirrel Dawn’s family raised, and who filled Dawn’s childhood with surprises and laughter. Snowshoeing with Mom while browsing deer look on. An atypical image of sorrow, bringing the realization that even a child of the wild hills was aware of the trials and violence people throughout the world endured. Many sketches of the unknown and imagined ocean and all its creatures (which she had seen only in books), with a little old man walking among them with his cane, and the beginnings of a story called “The Man Who Lived in the Sea.” The fierce Wyoming wind; Dawn’s beloved pony Whickery; an experiment in abstraction; a Halloween night filled to bursting with dragons, skeletons, witches, ghosts, goblins, and unnamable frights; an imagination sparked by a rare visit to a zoo, which filled Dawn’s mind with jungle growth, zebras, leopards, toucans, monkeys and peccaries. Together, all these images express a whole which a visitor to Dawn’s mother’s house summed up, wide-eyed: “Love!” she exclaimed. “Your home is filled with love!” 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! |
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