2010 Artists

NPS/Pringle

Kathleen Durkin
Baltimore, MA
Spring 2010, Skagit
Painter, mural artist

Click here to view Kathleen's mural she painted with local elementary school students.

Kathleen Durkin is a developing artist, originally from Baltimore, Maryland, who spent six months of 2010 living in the North Cascades, where she excelled as a community mural artist. She completed her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009 and her artist residency brought her to the North Cascades National Park, where she contributed both to the park and the local community. Kathleen’s art has been showcased at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the MICA Fine Arts Department Exhibition, at Concrete Elementary School and now at North Cascades National Park Visitor Center. She is well versed in painting, drawing, and print-making. Kathleen completed three large murals as she worked with the students at Concrete Elementary, the First Bloom Program and on the ‘Kids Corner’ at the Visitor Center.

Public Presentation
Kathleen worked with students on site at Concrete Elementary to paint two large murals during May 2010. The key Skagit River Watershed Mural now greets all visitors to the Concrete School. During October, students and faculty gathered for its dedication as Kathleen congratulated the student’s accomplishment and encouraged them to keep making art, wherever and whenever they can. AIR coordinator, Cindy Bjorklund celebrated the work as an example of collaboration the park can provide with local schools and communities while creatively expressing knowledge about their local environment.

 

Jay Needham

Jay Needham
Spring 2010, Stehekin
Sound artist

Artist website

Needham is a sound artist and composer who travels worldwide documenting soundscapes and creating artistic works from the recordings he gathers in the wilderness and the airwaves. The sounds he records are part of a landscape and a layered acoustic ecology. He seeks to preserve and interpret natural sounds and creates opportunities for listeners to consider the artistic and philosophical meanings of natural sound and silence.

Public Presentations
Acoustic ecology presentation: Needham introduced the concept of acoustic ecology and played many of the complex sounds he had recorded in Stehekin from the intensity of the treefrogs at the head of the lake to the bottom of the Stehekin River at Harlequin Bridge.

Sound recording workshop: This workshop started with a presentation of the high-tech equipment needed to record sound. Then group then recorded natural sounds, birds, wind and creeks, around the Golden West.

 

NPS/Bjorklund

Mark McGinnis
Boise, ID
Fall 2010, Skagit
Painter, watercolor and acrylic

Artist website

Mark W. McGinnis is an artist and writer living in Boise, Idaho after 30 years as an artist/educator in Southern Black Hills of South Dakota. He was a professor of art at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

His interdisciplinary approach to art has included paintings, artist's books, sculpture, printmaking, installation, video, performance, essays, and interviews. Research, inquiry and exploration guided his work on a range of subjects including science and philosophy, literature of India, religion, economics, foreign policy, nuclear weaponry, American Indian history, and explorers of the "New World." His publications and projects have been featured in over 120 solo exhibitions nationwide.

Abstract Naturalism is his newest body of work that fuses his interest in philosophy, physics, and cosmology with his love of modernist aesthetics. While in the North Cascades Mark produced many Plein Air sketches and acrylic paintings that he refers to as ‘Sentient Landscapes’.

Public Presentations
In addition to informal 'Studio Hours' at the North Cascades Visitor Center, Mark shared his artistic development in Sedro- Woolley and Concrete at public presentations.

 

Angela Mele

Angela Mele
Fall 2010, Skagit
Scientific illustration

Artist website

As an artist and an illustrator of the natural world, nothing intrigues Mele more than the smaller forces at work and their resilience: the undergrowth of forests, colonies of lichens on ancient rocks, mosses, fungi, and ferns in their periods of dormancy and sudden, teeming growth. Mele illustrates miniature landscapes, tiny ecosystems and detailed unseen microhabitats rendered larger-than-life.

Public Presentations
NCI Fungi Workshop: Mele had the opportunity to travel to the Environmental Learning Center to interact with the newest co-hort of graduate student and learn about the diversity of fungi in North Cascades National Park.

The World of Small: Mele presented her fascination with lichen and her work completed in Stehekin painting microscopic lichens through the eye of a microscope. The audience had the opportunity to look through the microscope to see what she was creating.