Electrical Box Wraps

Popo Agie Fishing

About the Club – Popo Agie Pistols 4H club was started in 2016 as a club dedicated to providing educational workshops and community service opportunities to Lander kids interested in what 4H has to offer. The families in this club are actively participating in the Lander community and making sure educational opportunities are plentiful for these kids. We are proud to be a part of this club and community.

About the Artwork – “Popo Agie Fishing” was created by 5 members of the Popo Agie Pistols 4H Club. They decided they wanted to do a group project, and when AtLAS released their contest it was a perfect opportunity to get together and make something happen. They scheduled a day to sit down together with paint and see what happened. They started by discussing the Popo Agie watershed and what they knew about it. They discussed the many species of fish and wildlife you can find on the water. One kid suggested painting a golden trout, and the painting began. Another kid suggested having a bear fishing for it. They sat down and shared the same canvas for a couple hours and formed the idea and completed it.

Thunder Comin’ In

A composite of two field sketches created while watching summer thunderstorms build. Wyoming’s expansive viewsheds provide prime opportunities for weather-watching and sketching storms while staying safe and dry. These paintings were made in pen and ink, graphite, and watercolor, and they epitomize the dynamic nature of Wyoming’s summers.

Hayfield Rosé and Wild Rose Hip(sters) are a pair of field sketches which celebrate late summer in the Mountain West. When the roses are both blooming and putting on seed, and hay ripening and ready to cut, the bounty of wild and cultivated foods makes it easy to see Wyoming through a rose-tinted lens.

Bethann Garramon Merkle, MFA, is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator. She teaches and conducts research on science communication (including illustration and writing) at the University of Wyoming. In her work, Merkle explores how stories and art influence people’s understanding and appreciation of the complex intersections between people, wildlife, and wild places. Merkle holds a B.A. in environmental studies, wilderness issues, and fine art (University of Montana, 2007) and an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing (University of Wyoming, 2017). Connect with her at www.ecologicallytruestory.org

Rainbow Splash:

Inspiration for this piece is drawn from Wyoming’s beautiful summer sunlight and its pristine river systems. Movement and color are thematic in the trout’s spots and water splashing. I imagined the fish swimming in watercolor and dazzling its viewer in full trout regalia.

Trout shake:

Variety is the spice of life! There are no rules in art, allowing creation to reflect our unique perspectives. “Trout shake” uses color and implied human characteristics to explore diversity. I found it sweet to allow them to dance as humans do.

Noelle Weimann is an artist of Lander Wyoming. She holds a BS in Oil painting and a BA in Art History from Southern Connecticut State University. She specializes in pleinair and figure painting, where she can create works in a limited time frame, capturing the quick movements, energy and personality of her subject matter. Weimann explores space by using color. Her palette evokes emotion and moment by exaggerated light and color saturation. Weimann attributes her style to her own visual light sensitivity and natural dilation of the eyes. Weimann draws inspiration from Fauvists and other Postmodern movements. She is a self described ‘colorist’ and employes color as a catalyst in her art. Weimann will also use layered line work in her expression as a way of showing ‘color fields’ or ‘energy planes.’

Weimann is currently a member of Sweetwater Studio and of Alchemy An Artists’ Cooperative, both located on Main Street, Lander Wyoming.

Zach Even 

Zach Even grew up in Green River, Wyoming, and now lives in Lander with his wife, Anne, and their twins Brooks, and Adlyn. He enjoys passing along his love for the outdoors and art to his children. From a young age Zach learned to tie flies to entice trout in pristine streams, hike and climb mountains, and hunt pronghorn, deer and elk with a bow. As a teen, he tucked notepads into his pack on these excursions to sketch what he saw, satisfying a desire to connect with a natural world we often are disconnected from. So it was natural for Zach to transform these snapshots to canvas. Zach's major passions involve the outdoors. He climbed Gannett Peak in Wyoming as a youngster, and later added a handful of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks to his list. He’s also climbed Mount Rainier in Washington and reached the summit of Denali / Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America.

His talent landed him a job as a graphic designer for the outdoor retailer Cabela’s, where his paintings and sketches of moose, elk and trout attracted the attention of company executives when they were looking for artwork to adorn catalog covers. Zach’s eye-catching painting of a trout filling up on nymphs earned him the coveted cover of the annual fly fishing catalog. And his rendition of a pronghorn buck was selected by Nebraska’s Game and Fish Commission for use on the Nebraska Habitat Stamp one fall. His artwork was improving, but Zach continually pushed himself to refine his skill. It is important to Zach to make his work different from the standard wildlife art. His work holds the viewer’s eye because of its unique perspective, emotion, clarity, color, detail and even humor. His paintings and sketches truly capture a moment in time: A pronghorn buck resting, its eyes alert; a fat rainbow trout flapping its gills while cradled in an angler’s hands, a crouching rooster pheasant, ready to flush from cover; or a bull elk bugling in fall, its nostrils flaring and head tilted backward. His work has an authenticity about it that can’t be matched by those who simply don’t spend time in the field.

Description of Series:

Zach began painting his close-up fish series in 2000. The pieces used for the electrical box series were painted from references he caught from local waters. The rainbow and brown trout were from the Popo Agie River near Sinks Canyon, and the brook and golden trout were from the mountain lakes in the wilderness area above Lander