Glacier Park and the Eastern Front of the Rocky Mountains, where the prairie meets the mountains, are constantly changing and eternally unchanged places. Living and working in a landscape defined both by transformation and permanence makes the project of painterly representation a uniquely spiritual endeavor for Roger Rink. He follows the line of a horizon that exists only for a moment in a particular light, traces a contour that comes forth briefly in singular shadows, shapes and colors. To paint in Glacier is to realize that the project of art and of living involves the attempt to approach—to get closer in both human and spatial senses—to the beauty and the austerity of the physical world.

Roger’s influences are diverse: the pleine air tradition, abstract expressionism, the landscapes of John Henry Twatchman and Issac Levitan, the colors of Robert Motherwell’s “multiform” paintings, and the ecstatic and sensual line of Amedeo Modigliani. He paints, sketches, writes, and thinks outdoors, and brings his impressions and material back to the studio where he continues to work to open the canvas through further study and refinement of surface, tone, affect and shape. In his work, Roger aims to reflect deeply, to meditate, and even to dream about life and place both for himself and for the viewer of the canvas.