EDUCATION
1984 Elementary and Art K-12 teaching certification, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT
1980 BA, Studio Arts, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT
EXPERIENCE
1984-2004 Educator in public schools in Gallatin County, MT and Kumamoto, Japan
1984-1986 Printmaking for Jessie Wilber, Bozeman, MT
EXHIBITIONS
2026 Art Week Park County, Live and Silent Auctions,
2026 Bozeman Art Museum, Art Fair, Bozeman, MT
2016 Intersections of Trout and Art juried exhibition, Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture, Bozeman, MT,
2014 Sweet Pea Art Festival, Bozeman, MT, juried exhibition, first place
2002 Ana 31, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, MT, juried exhibition.
1979 Sweet Pea Art Festival, Bozeman, MT, juried exhibition, honorable mention
Connie Lange lives and works in Bozeman, MT. She studied art at the University of South Florida, Eastern Montana College and Montana State University, receiving a BA in 1980 in studio art with a focus on printmaking. Subsequent to that she worked for two years as a printmaker for Jessie Wilber, a former art professor at Montana State University, who was a member of the group of artists credited with bringing modern art to Montana.
Before returning to a full-time art practice, she earned teaching credentials and taught art K-12 and elementary education intermittently between 1984 and 2004 in Gallatin County, MT and Kumamoto, Japan. She received a Recognition for Excellence from the Department of Education at MSU in 1984, and the Governor’s Award of Appreciation from the Governor of Kumamoto, Japan in 1995.
Her recent work leaves behind an earlier practice in photorealistic drawings from the early 2000s which depict close-up vignettes taken from the streams she fishes. She now works in an abstract landscape style distilling, rather then recording, her experiences in the backcountry through charcoal drawings and acrylic paintings. Of particular interest are the colors found in the Western landscape which she arbitrarily assigns to the massive shapes and arrangements of the boulder fields found in higher elevations.
THE BOULDERS
About this series
I have been formed by years of backpacking above timberline and wading cold streams with a fly rod in hand. In such places the “quiet beauty” of Montana has seeped into my being, as it does for many of us. In this series of paintings I have distilled my experiences of the high altitude boulders fields and other rock formations into abstractions, focusing on their massive shapes, broken arrangements and craggy lines and fractures. Line, shape and composition. The colors are not local color but speak to the excitement I feel when I am stopped in my tracks at the sight of these timeworn geologic events. I borrow color from the trees and foliage that also hold my gaze. I use small notes of contrasting color to punctuate a detail that is only observed when one stops long enough to look as the ordinary.