Theodore Waddell | Biography

Biography
The heart and hand needed to create a strong American painting is not limited to those living east of the Mississippi. It is a product of endless work, self-evaluation, and the courage to allow one's paintings to evolve. It demands the marriage of the artist's lifestyle and his work. Theodore Waddell exemplifies this definition. His enthusiasm and lifestyle are reflected in the way he works and the imagery he uses.

Waddell's paintings are a combination of rough marks, thick paint, transparent elegant strokes, and, on a few occasions a slow, hard line scratched into the canvas. You can feel the movement of the paint throughout the paintings, but the subjects are frozen. They are not frozen as a stagnant object, but captured as a solitary image. Captured, interpreted, and enveloped in the landscape. They are carved out of, or laid onto the green and grey-yellow of the spring and summer, or the white canopy of winter. And sometimes there are ghosts in the paintings, the faint image of what has changed in the piece or decays in the pasture. These ghosts are metaphors for the struggle and change that is constant in life; our own mortality. Waddell states, "The understanding of death brings about a feeling of wonderfulness and appreciation of life and just how fragile and magical it all is."

Whether Waddell is studying the changing seasons, animals as individuals, or the later figures, one can see his magic in his reverence for nature and celebration of paint. He is a painter's painter: strong hearted, sure handed, and high spirited.

Therefore, if I must categorize Waddell, he will live in the ranks of American painters and not be limited to the confines of the western artist.

Jennifer Complo McNutt
Curator of Contemporary Art
Eiteljorg Museum

Theodore Waddell's sophisticated modernist paintings have attracted widespread recognition. A native Montanan cattle rancher, Waddell most often paints freely-rendered range animals roaming the vast plains of Eastern Montana. In his work he draws a deliberate parallel between his subject and the elements of abstract art: cattle and horses are motifs formally arranged on the flattened and enveloping painted "ground" characteristic of modernism. Noted earlier for heavily textured surfaces, Waddell's recent paintings are more atmospheric, with translucent wax medium layers suggesting the drift of grazing animals, transitions of days, and the procession of the seasons.

Theodore Waddell was born in Billings, MT in 1941 and raised in Laurel, MT. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Eastern Montana College, and Wayne State University, Detroit (MFA, 1968). Waddell taught at the University of Montana from 1968 to 1976, and has since been a full time artist and rancher. He has had over ninety one-man exhibitions, major surveys at the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, and the Denver Art Museum.

Waddell's father, Teddy, painted boxcars for the Northern Pacific railroad. When Teddy would return home at night he relaxed with a paint-by-numbers art piece while his son watched in fascination. Young Waddell's budding interest in paint paralleled a growing interest in music. He played coronet in a high school dance band, traveling on weekends to play for dances in nearby Montana towns. His interest in music would later turn to jazz, which in turn influenced his art.

An early interest in architecture was squelched when he flunked a math test at Eastern Montana College in Billings. Instead Waddell enrolled in Isabelle Johnson's (known as Montana's first modernist painter) painting class. After a few days with her, he decided painting was what he wanted to do the rest of his life. Johnson's work, steeped in the nineteenth-century European traditions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism rather than traditional Western realism that had long dominated art in the region, clearly had impact on Waddell's style of painting. Waddell studied with Johnson for two years and received his first big break with a scholarship to study at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Homesick after a little more than a year of study, Waddell jumped on a plane home and upon arriving in Laurel, found his draft papers waiting for him. Waddell went on to spent two years in the U.S. Army, playing trumpet and touring with a big band. Returning to Billings, he finished his degree at Eastern, and then his Master's of fine arts at Wayne State University in Detroit.

In 1968 Waddell joined the University of Montana art faculty, teaching sculpture and design. For eight years he lived in Arlee, teaching at the University and creating many minimalist-influenced, polished steel sculptures that can still be viewed in many towns and cities across the state. "When we were living in the mountains, making sculpture made sense and it fit within the context of the narrow mountain valleys," Waddell says.

In 1976 Waddell left UM and took a job as a manager for a large ranch north of Laurel owned by relatives of his wife Betty. "On the prairie, where you can see for 150 miles in any direction, sculpture made no sense to me," he said, "I couldn't afford to make sculpture on the scale necessary for it to make sense so I went back to drawing and painting, drawing first, and then, after feeling the need for a scale change, painting our black cows." For years, Waddell ranched and painted, rarely showing any of his work.

In 1982 Waddell did exhibit a group of his paintings of cattle and landscapes in the sales arena at the Billings livestock auction yard. Soon after, a curator from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. came to town looking for artists to include in a painting biennial, the Second Western State Exhibition. Waddell's paintings were among those chosen for the biennial and ended up being singled out in reviews by the Washington Post and The New York Times. They were also the subject of a Newsweek article; thus his career was launched. The exhibit traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues, and Waddell signed on with noted galleries in San Francisco and Reno, Nevada. Contracts soon followed with galleries in Chicago, Santa Fe, Seattle, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Waddell left the ranching life in 1995, moving to the Gallatin Valley east of Bozeman. He now divides his time between homes in Sheridan, Wyoming and Hailey, Idaho, where his wife, Lynn Campion, a writer and photographer, teaches at the Sun Valley Art Center.





Permanent Collections
Albrecht-Kemper, St. Joseph, MO
Apple Computer, Inc., Saratoga, CA
Arco Corporation, Los Angeles CA; Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Bank of America, San Francisco, CA
Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID
Buffalo Bill Historical Museum, Cody, WY
Carnation Company, Los Angeles, CA
Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, WA
Churchill Arts Council, Fallon, NV
Citadel Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ
Clorox Corporation, San Francisco, CA
Custer County Art Center, Miles City, MT
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Eureka Opera House, Eureka, NV
Federal Reserve Bank, Minneapolis MN and Helena, MT
First Interstate Bank, Las Vegas, NV
Frederick R. Weisman Company, Los Angeles, CA
Frito-Lay Corporation, Dallas, TX
Goddard Center for Performing and Visual Arts, Ardmore, OK
Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA
Hallie Ford Museum of Art-Willamette University, Salem, OR
Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO
Hallmark Corporation, Kansas City, MO
Harrah's Enterprises, Reno, NV
Hockaday Art Center, Kalispell, MT
Holter Museum, Helena, MT
International Business Machines
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Marriot Corporation, San Antonio, TX
Merck Corporation, West Point, PA
Michener Collection, Austin, TX
Missoula Museum of the Arts, Missoula, MT
Mobil Oil, New York, NY
Moran Eye Institute, Salt Lake City, UT
Mulvane Art Museum, KS
Nestles Corporation, Los Angeles, CA
Nordstrom, Seattle, WA
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND
North Dakota State University Memorial Union Gallery, Fargo, ND
Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Spokane, WA
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
Omaha National Bank, Omaha, NE
Palm Desert Museum, Palm Desert, CA
Paris Gibson Museum, Great Falls, MT
Pillsbury Corporation, Minneapolis, MN
Progressive Corporation, Pepper Pike, OH
Quad Graphics, West Allis, WI
Rayovac Corporation, Madison, WI
Robert Redford
Rocky Mountain College, Billings, MT
Saint Lukes Hospital, Ketchum, ID
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
Security Pacific Bank, Los Angeles, CA
Sheldon Memorial Museum, Lincoln, NE
Sierra Pacific Power, Reno, NV
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Springfield Art Museum
Stanford University Hospital, Stanford, CA
Ringo Starr
Topeka Public Library, Topeka, KS
United Airlines, Chicago, IL
United Missouri Bank, Kansas City, MO
University Hospital, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
University of Kansas School of Arts, Lawrence, KS
University of Nevada - Reno, Knowledge Center
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
University of North Dakota, Fargo, ND
University of Texas, Austin, TX
University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY
US Bank
Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, MT