BY KAREN BOSSICK
Poo Wright-Pulliam will be Artist-in-Residence for the Wood River Land Trust for 2021.
The Hailey artist and naturalist, known for leading bird sighting tours, is the Land Trust’s first Artist-in-Residence.
As Artist-in-Residence she will be working with the Land Trust to paint the many preserves that have been restored and cared for by the Land Trust.
“Exciting!” said Wright-Pulliam.
Wright-Pulliam focuses her art on nature and wildlife.
She has already served as an Artist-in-Residence at the City of Rocks near Oakley and at Craters of the Moon National Preserve and Monument.
She spent 21 days at Craters during the summer of 2015 sketching and painting every species she could identify from plants to mammals to birds. In all, she created 139 portraits in “The Devil’s Vomit,” the term used by the emigrants as they passed through Craters on their way west.
She stayed under the granite spires of City of Rocks, capturing the flora and wildlife there a year later.
Her art was honored at the Flora of the National Parks 100th Anniversary in 2016 at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. And her art was honored by the Wyoming Conservation Stamp Competition.
She is self-taught in scratchboard, water color and painting ceramics and has studied under a host of other artists.
One of her scratchboard pieces just topped an art competition hosted by the River Otter Ecology Project. Wright-Pulliam created the scratchboard piece in 2001 for the Wyoming Conservation Stamp competition.
“I went to Elkhorn Pond and saw the otters playing there,” she recounted. “It was so much fun watching them and then creating something from that observation.”