Glacier artist gives audience a hands-on experience

The Brown Bag speaker series has gone on now at Glacier National Park for several years, but Melinda Whipplesmith Plank may be the first speaker to give folks a hands-on experience.

Whipplesmith Plank is currently the Park’s artist-in-residence, a program whereby artists spend up to a month in a Park Service cabin on the shores of Lake McDonald while they ply their craft. Whipplesmith Plank is a printmaker for northern California’s Marble Mountains, where she also runs a 300-head cattle ranch with her husband.

“I was introduced to printmaking about 12 years ago,” she said. “I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Whipplesmith Plank said she hopes to produce at least five plates of work from her time in the Park. She visits new scenes each day, takes photos, makes sketches and paints landscapes. Those will form the base work of the final plates.

“Just getting the colors right has been a challenge,” she said.

Whipplesmith Plank did some small carvings for folks who attended the talk to make their own prints. Each picture is carved into a block of wood or etched into a piece of copper in reverse. Ink is applied and then the block is pressed onto paper, making a print. People walked away with prints of bear grass, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and a picture of Mount Reynolds.

Those were simple prints. Whipplesmith Plank’s more complicated work involves creating several plates, all of different colors, which she will later press at her California studio. It’s a painstaking process with attention to detail. Each plate is hand-carved from a tracing paper template.

“You always make sure you’re carving away from your hands,” she said.

The slow process is challenging, organic and more gratifying that mediums like photography, she said. Her work in Glacier Park has a simple goal.

“I want to convey the rock and water and how they come together,” she said.

Whipplesmith Plank’s art can be viewed online at www.whipplesplank.net.