Kalispell Artist Sydney Boveng is Bringing it All Together, One Piece at a Time

For the last two years, Sydney Boveng has been bringing people together through arts markets and small shows. It’s made the 27-year-old Kalispell artist something of a conduit for connecting certain artists, art buyers, and art appreciators in the Flathead.

It’s a lot of work, but she’s also come to appreciate the good feeling she gets from bringing people together, like an artist and a client. It’s almost like “a little matchmaking moment,” she said. And the more of those connections that are made, the more she thinks it will benefit the local art community at large.

“The bigger and more connected our communities are, it benefits every single one of us,” she said.

At the same time Boveng has been bringing people together, she’s also continued to bring together a body of work made up of pieces that represent a variety of artistic disciplines, mediums and methods. Her small studio includes clothing with block-printed designs, sketchbooks with a mix of words and drawings, landscape paintings, stickers, postcards, portraits, and even wood-burned illustrations. Some of her works are a more faithful depiction of things as they appear in nature, while others take things that exist in life, or in fantasy, and reconstitute them through her distinct application of scale, shape and color.

Art is something that Boveng said has been a part of her life for a long time. She describes her family as a creative one. For example, her grandfather, Oystein Boveng, was an architect. An obituary published after his death in 2014 credited his modernist designs and engineering as being seen in buildings around northwest Montana, including the Summit House at Whitefish Mountain Resort, Grouse Mountain Lodge, the visitors’ centers at Logan Pass and St. Mary, and Northridge Lutheran Church. He also designed the home where Boveng has her small studio.

One of the largest parts of her artistic practice are her sketchbooks, and Boveng even took the step last summer of having one of those sketchbooks published. The colorful combination of drawings, more in-depth sketches, annotations and written passages amount in their entirety to a single work of art made up of smaller pieces. As a sensory-oriented person who appreciates the tactile side of art, Boveng said she hates making digital work.

“I touch things and feel and hear things,” she said. “I hope that’s what people want to feel in my work too, is that it indulges more senses than just ‘It’s a nice picture.’”

One of the things that Boveng especially values about her sketchbook, and the act of sketching or making quick works of art, is what she believes is the fundamental power of making a mark on a page. In workshops that she sometimes teaches, she said that she talks about how there’s an empowering and freeing feeling that comes with making marks on a page no matter how good they may look. In her experience, to try and draw something, especially as it appears in nature, requires a level of focus so complete that you can’t think of anything else. Using the sketchbook as a platform for mark-making transforms it into a powerful tool, according to Boveng.

“Especially in a time when I think almost all of us are struggling to focus, struggling to be bored and present in the moment, because we all want to just be on our phones,” she said, “I’ve always been able to get lost in my sketchbook and be happy in that way.”  

But the multitude of art forms that Boveng pursues in addition to her sketchbook works speak to other motivations, too. Going down all these different artistic avenues, she said she’s partially motivated by the kind of dopamine hit that comes with learning something new (she’s currently teaching herself how to oil paint) and the experience of growing and improving a skill.

But she also attributed her impulse to branch out, and change it up, to a reluctance to be boxed in by one type of work or another. It’s a trajectory that can feel inevitable for some artists. As she put it, what an artist becomes known for is what allows them to develop a fan base. And then there’s the added pressure of trying to create personally satisfying art that may not be as big of a draw in a market in which tastes tend to gravitate towards the landscapes and imagery of the West.

One small, occasional strategy Boveng employs to sidestep an art admirer’s geographic biases, whether they’re conscious or not, is to simply avoid putting a title with a place’s name on a work, or to use more ambiguous names. One of Boveng’s most popular prints is of a painting she made of a mountain meadow she came across while traveling in Tasmania. But when she first started selling it, the title was on a small label on the back of the painting. People at markets didn’t always see the title, and thus weren’t always aware that what they were seeing was a depiction of Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. Instead, they would often think it was Glacier National Park, or a mountain range near Bozeman. It led Boveng to think more about the power of ambiguous or creative titles for her works. Now, her pieces sometimes have names that are more obvious, or direct, but not always.

“I like the idea that people can, if you leave an ambiguous title, make it fit into their life more,” Boveng said. “Which is kind of the magic of art.”

But assigning her work more conceptual names isn’t just an occasional work-around to try and avoid being penned in by the expectations of conventional western art. It’s also sometimes an extension of how she sees and creates art. Some of her drawings and paintings are representative of a combination of memory and story. At times she’s found herself writing in order to paint. It’s a way of understanding what she is trying to convey with her visual art.

One piece, called, “If I Could Take My Place Amongst the Flowers,” shows a feminine figure looking to the distance amid an all-encompassing array of plants, flowers, and other foliage. It is, as Boveng described it in a note appended to the work, “a piece about walking with family alone, bearing witness to loved ones breaking through winter’s cover, moving through the landscape that is home, waking up in pain, watching tiny grasses move in the wind, committing to trust yourself, and being a tiny entity on a big beautiful planet.”

Boveng said that she’s excited to continue with landscape art, and other styles that people have come to expect — and proven they want — in her work, while also continuing to spend more time on personal, story-driven works.

“It’s really exciting to work on stuff that feels more genuinely me,” she said.

To see more of Sydney Boveng’s work, check out https://www.sydneyboveng.com/.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series of profiles of Tarek Penser and Sydney Boveng, two Flathead Valley artists who were selected for this summer’s Artist-Wilderness Connection residency, which is sponsored by the Glacier Art Museum, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation, and the Flathead National Forest.

As part of their residency, Penser and Boveng will spend a week in a cabin on the east side of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The two artists will be creating individual works inspired by the natural scenes around them, but in their distinct styles. They will also collaborate by creating works of art using reference sketches from each other. Click here to read about Tarek Penser’s work.

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