Theodore Waddell

This book provides an in-depth exploration of Theodore Waddell's career as a sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Born in 1941 in Billings, Waddell has long been recognized as one of Montana's most significant contemporary artists. His importance to the development of late modernism in the West lies in his ability to capture the truth and authenticity of his experience, without coy sentimentality. Waddell's early work reflects the minimalist sensibility that predominated in the late 1960s. His steel sculptures of the early 1970s led to the Trophy Heads series of the 1980s, where he looks with humor, irony, and some horror on life in the West. Related paintings explore bawdy life in bars and after-hour haunts. Since the mid-1980s Waddell's abstract landscapes, sometimes populated with cows or sheep, capture the feel and flavor of one of the last truly rural areas in America. He lives in Manhattan, Montana, and Hailey, Idaho.