Danielle Clouse Gast
Growing up and living in Northwest Iowa, routes to and from different towns have been memorized and
have only seemed to slightly change over the years.
The landscape has become the welcome constant in my daily life when driving place to place. But on many occasionswhen the intention is to truly “see” the landscape (still often from the car window), beautiful, abstract things can be found that are not that far removed from what is truly there.
What do I look at? Shadows running down a ditch. Fence posts creating not only borders, but lines reaching up into a horizon. Corrugated metal siding on a building that has turned a warm rust orange.Wonder-fully organized grove lines and plant rows whose placed structure en mass pulls away from its individual organic shape. The same routes, the same landscapes, viewed at different times of day and
different times of year.
Though often ignored and occasionally referenced in conversation by local landmarks, this section of
Iowa landscape is the classic subject matter I have chosen to employ in my work. Due to this focus,
venturing from small town to small town usually lends itself more to research than travel.
New to the body of work within the last few years has been the inclusion of a husband with a pilot’s license – allowing a new view of this landscape I thought I knew well. This new perspective on the area has opened up doors of new compositions, color possibilities, and most importantly, emphasized the style I usually employ in my paintings: organized, geometric lines and breakdown of the familiar landscape.
Danielle Clouse Gast Gallery
Originally from Ruthven, IA, Danielle Clouse Gast received her Associate of Arts Degree from Iowa Lakes Community College and her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Northwest Missouri State University with an emphasis in painting and ceramics. Her paintings are in many corporate and private collections
throughout the United States. She works out of a studio in her home in Spirit Lake, IA.