david eubank's Page

Living and working in Montana has many challenges and rewards for me as an artist. The natural beauty of Montana is unmatched by any attempt to reproduce it’s majestic and scenic beauty by any tool an artist like myself might use. The best I can hope for is a work of art that reflects my feelings about the landscape. I spend a great deal of my time living and working in the wilderness for the National Park Service in Glacier National Park and as an artist this helps me to understand the quietness of this place and places like it-- places where cell phones don’t work and where you can think and breathe. Today the isolation of the wilderness that has been Montana has been broken by modern communications, cell phones and the internet; the great distances to the major cities are now just a mouse click away on the information highway. Yet the very environment, the natural environment that attracted me and so many visitors to the region is under a relentless attack by unplanned as well as by poorly planned development, which threatens to destroy Montana’s uniqueness and beauty. The qualities that attracted so many of us to this place and places like it are being replaced by the development of new Box Cities paved with endless parking lots throughout Montana and America. Development that we have come to believe we need and miss so much that we want it here-- here in Montana. The very place we came to escape the sameness that has overtaken the landscape across an America of endless McDonalds, Strip Malls and Big Box Stores has grown into new cities and towns not built to live and walk in, but to drive to. Perhaps this has happened in another way? Developers brought development and products here and we were all told we needed them and we believed the developers and the corporate retailers and sought to have the need for these products. This is in stark contrast to having true needs and then developing products and services to fill our true desires and needs. Two questions I would ask you: Does the new development in Montana and across America fill your needs and can we develop what we want, what we need in a more thoughtful way that will preserve the very qualities of the land we love? Will we miss the sky as much as we missed the city? Escape into the landscape, find a quiet place where cell phones don’t work and think on this for awhile and don’t forget to breathe.

Maybe we will meet on the trail.

David Lee Eubank