Distinctly Montana Magazine

View From Elk Ridge American conservation organizations led by Wilderness Watch have enlisted him to paint a commemorative poster celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Wilderness Act of 1964. It's a commission that will be seen by millions. Yet another recent accolade worth noting is that in 2011 Dolack was feted in Geneva, Switzerland, by world leaders as part of the United Nation's International Year of Forests, which featured 24 selected works arranged around the title "Art of Trees". Such affirmation must be pried out of the modest Mr. Dolack, for he is not a self-promoter, other than operating a namesake gallery on West Front Street in downtown Missoula where works by him and his painter wife, Mary Beth Percival, are sold. Dolack likes to use his art to make statements; in doing so, he has created imagery for over 200 environmental and social organizations. When painting purely for himself, he is a post-modernist, first inspired as a youth by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Yet for anyone who believes Dolack can be neatly pigeonholed, his portfolio emanates stylistic defiance. A few years ago, I had a conversation about Dolack with Anne Morand, then chief curator at the Charles M. Russell Museum in Dolack's hometown of Great Falls. "His work causes us to think and reflect on our values, not to beat us DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL over the head," Morand noted. "He uses paint to articulate beauty as it relates to the evolving global environmental ethic." For that reason, the Missoulian newspaper put Dolack on its list of the 100 most influential Montanans of the 20th century. Born in Great Falls in 1950, Dolack is the grandson of a man who worked at a coal mine in Belt and the son of a father who was employed by the legendary Anaconda Company in its copper smelting operation located near the banks of the Missouri River. Dolack, too, spent his formative years working in the industrial maw to earn enough money for college. It was an experience, he says, that was more kindred to being raised in a Rust Belt city like Pittsburgh or Cleveland than a river town where, in 1805, Lewis & Clark chronicled extraordinary sights of wildlife abundance in their journals. "I still think of the duality and the contrasts that are still all around us," he says, noting that thematically they loom large in "Altered State." He describes the pieces, most of them still under wraps, from a studio space within view of Mt. Jumbo and the federal Rattlesnake Wilderness outside of Missoula. Beside him, standing in a line, are objects that speak to his fascination with Op Art and throwaway consumer society. All in a row are a bobble- Monte getting an award on "The Art of Trees" at the UN in Geneva: www.distinctlymontana.com/dolack133 w w w. d i s t i n c t lymo nt a na .co m 21

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