Blue bears, purple moose and brightly-colored geometric shapes. This is the way artist DG House sees the animals and landscapes of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and how she brings them to life in her paintings.
An enrolled member of the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama, House has been part of the Indigenous Arts and Cultural Demonstration residency program at Grand Teton National Park for decades and has been connected to the region for more than 40 years.
“Your job is to interact with the visitors, help them with whatever they want to know, including where's the ice cream. It's your job to know all of that. And then, you talk about art,” she said.
The rotating weeklong residency is in the process of shifting its focus to artists from the 24 tribes that the park recognizes as having traditional ties to the area. House jokingly referred to herself as the “old lady” of the program.
“I'm kind of the transition between what it was and what it will be eventually,” said House. “Right now I'm a legacy artist, and as long as they'll have me, I will return. But eventually, it'll be all the people whose ancestors lived in this area and that's a nice thing.”
House sat down with Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann at the Colter Bay Visitor Center, where the artist spent a week this summer connecting with visitors and practicing her craft in real time. She shared about her creative process and the stories behind a few of her paintings.
Editor’s note: The following is a transcription of DG House describing several of her pieces. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Many, many years ago, I was at Old Faithful and a man walks by. He never stops, he just says this to me as he goes by, ‘You should only paint in the colors that appear in this park.’ And I watched him walk off and I thought, ‘Yes.’ So I changed, at that moment, my entire palette and now, every color on it appears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
But what I do that's different is I will use the colors in a different subject. I do a blue that appears in so many of the beautiful springs in Yellowstone, but they now become blue bears. Or the purple of the mountains become purple moose.
Behind Jackson Lake Lodge decades ago, I was down there and went down the steps behind the lodge. In the willows, a bull moose came out in the full moon and he glowed purple.
So my moose have been mostly purple ever since then, and that's how these real experiences happen. My art is also based on a real experience. So every single painting you see from me, something happened for real.
This bison in particular, it was – I would say three years ago, and I'm coming from Lake to Canyon, and he was a raggedy boy! He was so powerful and so big, and the grass was so –when you see grass, it's that yellow-green, and the grass was so big.
He was walking on the side of the road. We were all alone. Nobody else ever came [during] our whole interaction. And I literally was able to just pull over and watch him walk out the window. I mean, that happens to a lot of people, but that was a moment for me.
This was all about light and being alone. It gets rarer and rarer to have an interaction with wildlife that's just yours. Yours and theirs. And this was one of those moments.
Let me tell you [another] one. I hope you're all interested in this one. I'm coming off of the old road, before the flood, out of Mammoth and I'm going down to Gardner and there's a pull-off right there by Mount Everts. I pull off. There are two wolves in the creek and they're pulling something, and I look and it's an elk leg. They're literally tussling, whatever you want to call it, and tossing it and all that.
So I step out of the car. You have to understand, I'm so far away and I just, I'm leaning on my car. I'm not walking anywhere. I pull up the lens and they stop and they look at me and every cell in my body said, ‘Get in the car.’ And I immediately got in the car and rolled up the window and enjoyed them doing what they did.
But I'll tell you, every instinct in my body, I knew it didn't matter that I was that far away. I knew what they said. It's like, ‘You got it! You are in charge. I am visiting your house.’ So I got in the car. Anyway, there's a painting of that, too, of the two of them with the elk leg going back and forth, and I made that stare, both of them looking at the cameras, and it was the same look.
Make the time to visit your state park, your national park. Don't say someday, don't say someday. Just say, ‘I'm going,’ and pick a date and go.
I don't care which one it is. They're all magnificent in their own way and feel that and get that feeling. And then to artists, I want to say that it's absolutely possible to be a full time artist if you want to be. If you want art to be something you get to do for your own soul at home, that's good, too.
