Dana Hart-Stone's inspiration comes from wandering the vast, history-rich countryside of Eastern Montana as a child. Discovering evidence of personal narratives of Americans who settled the West, Hart-Stone found broken pottery, parched leather boots, ripped lace curtains, newspapers tacked onto walls, and rusty barbed wire from early Montana settlers. He became a cultural anthropologist, trying to piece together unknown narratives of the Western experience.
Today, Hart-Stone seeks grounding in authentic Western histories through found, vintage, American imagery, creating compositional paintings with vernacular photography. After choosing specific, content-rich snapshots, he scans the images, manipulates the forms, and places the images into filmstrips to suggest stories of life developing in the West. Each of Hart-Stone's unique finished paintings evoke a sense of place, remembrance, nostalgia, longing, and the passing of time. Family, friendship, transportation, architecture, community, and civic pride are themes that work to reveal the vast topography of the shared human experience.
Educated in Montana and California, Dana Hart-Stone has exhibited his signature paintings extensively on the West Coast and throughout the Midwest, and has been honored with an Excellence in Teaching Award and an Honorable Mention at the Indiana Caucus for Art from the South Bend Regional Museum of Art.
