Artists Days: 2009

In early 2009 a call for artwork went out to the community. Aside from the entry fee and registration date, there was one rule:

1. The artist had to have participated in the Diablo Trust Artist Days on the Land in 2007 and 2008.

All artistic forms were encouraged, including painting, photography, textiles, music, dance, ceramics, metalwork, and drawing - all could serve as examples of the artist's response to the Diablo Trust ranch lands. If you would like to see the full catalogue, please contact Jeremy Krones at the Diablo Trust office: info@diablotrust.org or (928)-523-0588.

From the Introduction to the "Diablo Trust Reflections of the Land 2009" Catalogue:

As with many happenings on the Diablo Trust, Reflections of the Land was created around a worn kitchen table where coffee and opinions flow freely. It was an idea born of the acknowledgement that each of us views the wide open spaces through a different lens, and that we communicate personal images to our family, friends, and community through a variety of stories, art and music.

The land area depicted in the following pages is the Diablo Trust land area - home to two historic northern Arizona ranches, the Bar T Bar and the Flying M. The rich palette provided by this northern Arizona landscape extends from tall pine forests down to red rocks of the high desert plains, and this vast landscape remains largely void of fragmentation as it has for over 100 years.

The artists may have been inspired by the smell of summer rains that settle the dust and cleanse the air; the sounds of elk, deer and antelope foraging on browse or breaking rail through crusted beds of pine needles; the subtleties of miniature rust patterns etched by the elements on a long-abandoned cooking stove; round corrals filled with snakeweed and thistle waiting to be leveled by horses after they are moved to summer camps; or the white rings on wildlife and livestock watering tanks left by falling water levels after the winter snow melts meanders to lower ground.

Whatever the individual artist's motivation, the literary, performing and visual arts produced as a result of their experiences on the Diablo Trust lands will serve as a record of this place in this time. Thanks to them, in 2109, one hundred years from now, a rancher leafing through this catalogue may very well glean as much information about the state of our lands today as from the monitoring data we've saved on our computers. These paintings and photographs and written interpretations are more than just works of art; they are snapshots in time, bearing witness for generations to come.