Uneasily Pondering Serenity

Chris Amend is a Wyoming native, born in southwest Wyoming and raised in Worland. He attended the University of Wyoming, earning a BFA (1972) and an MFA (1974) in art. He began his teaching career in the UW Art Department, teaching drawing and painting while working toward his MFA,. He taught briefly at Bowling Green state University in Ohio, and returned to Wyoming in 1978. He settled with his family in Gillette, where he taught art for 29 years, teaching at Stocktrail Elementary, Recluse School, and for 24 years at Campbell County High School. He retired from full-time teaching in 2007, to focus his attention on his continuing growth as an artist. His work has been exhibited at venues ranging from small Wyoming towns to New York City and Paris, France, and is in private collections throughout the United States. As a member of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Artist Roster, he has taught classes and workshops throughout the state.

Since discovering, at the age of six, his innate ability to draw, Chris has devoted nearly seven decades to exploring the possibilities of visual expression. Rooted in classical drawing, his work seeks to find universal truths by delving deeply into the idiosyncratically personal realms of his own inner visions.

“I am a storyteller at heart. I work with a variety of materials and stylistic conventions, but however “realistic” or ‘stylized’ my images are, to me they are all of one thread. They are the visible tracks of the workings of my mind. The stylistic approach, and the materials used, vary with the nature and direction of the idea. Always, though, however far the imagery may stray from ‘realistic’ rendering. it remains firmly rooted in the discipline and practice of drawing. For me, art is about finding and assigning meanings to our experience, by asking such questions as ‘Who are we?’, ‘Where do we come from?’, and ‘Where are we going?’ Each image is an attempt to communicate a thought, through the language of visual metaphor. As artists, we send our individually eccentric visions out into the world, hoping that others will find resonant meaning in them.”