“If my personality is revealed in a plant drawing… it would be just the emotion and the way I felt when I depicted it at that moment, that day, or as the days go on the building up of layers like the unconscious.”
—Jim Dine
Intimately inscribed to his friend Alfred Stern for his birthday, this Jim Dine Thistle offers a glimpse into the artist’s personal life, notably of his visits in the 1970s to the sweeping landscape of Bar 7 Ranch in Ennis, Montana. Like many artists who sought periods of respite from their everyday life and environment, the thirty-five thousand acres that made up the ranch’s property offered Dine the perfect escape. Cable television pioneer Alfred Stern was an owner of the ranch and began to know Dine through his visits to the ranch’s wide expanses. Stern was an exceptionally busy New Yorker who, like Dine, found pleasure in the drastically different environment of Montana; though Stern served in high-powered positions at NBC, the Television Communications Corporation, and Warner Cable Corporation, he was just as comfortable clad in jeans and chaps, riding at the ranch, as he was at a black-tie gala in his tuxedo.
In the 1970s, the affable and kindhearted Stern invited artists with whom he was acquainted to the Montana property and brought in many friends from the art world, including the photographer Richard Avedon, to become part owners of Bar 7 Ranch. Avedon benefitted both personally and creatively from the decision, as an exceptionally well-received photograph he took of Bar 7 foreman Wilbur Powell led to his commission by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for his celebrated book of photographs In the American West.
Dine found natural inspiration within the Montana fauna. Flower and plants had been a long-enduring theme for Dine, owed to the fond memories the artist held tending flowers and vegetation with his grandmother in her Ohio garden. Rendered in hues of pinks and greens, these graphite, charcoal and watercolor drawings of bull thistles as observed in Ennis presents a distinct characterization of the vegetation of the Bar 7 Ranch. Highlighted and richly colored against the roughly sketched foliage that surrounds it, the species stands out to make itself most apparent, highlighting dually its natural beauty and the necessity of its identification for removal as part of the ranching process in Montana. The bright blossoms and exceptional height of bull thistles would have been available for Dine to draw from life both under the broad skies of Ennis and within the lush landscape outside his studio in Putney, Vermont, offering a poetic ecological parallel between these locales with which Dine would become familiar.
