Cory Allen Heidelberger, Lake Herman, South Dakota
Member Since October 2010
Artist Statement I have lived most of my life at Lake Herman, near Madison, SD. Despite numerous enjoyable travels and extended stays in places like Boston, Edmonton, Moscow, and Vancouver, I remain convinced that Lake Herman is the best place in the world to live...and to paint pictures.
I learned most of what I know about art from Jill Frederick in Madison. My favorite artists are John Singer Sargent, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock. During high school and college, my paintings tended toward portrait and still life. At the turn of the century, though, I began leaning toward non-representational art. While I admire the well-executed, lovingly crafted likeness of a daydreaming friend or a shimmering lake, I feel a desire to create something completely new, something unlike anything I see while bicycling across the prairie in July or snowshoe-ing across the lake in December.
I majored in math in college, but from 1998 to 2007 I taught high school English. I was the English department at Montrose High School, where I also coached oral interpretation, debate, and drama. Those activities gave me another outlet for my artistic energy, as I wrote one-act plays and readers theater scripts for my students to perform at contests, built minimal yet effective sets for our tiny school stage at the end of the gym, and directed plays in the fall and winter.
Since fall 2007, I have been a doctoral student and graduate research/teaching assistant in information systems at Dakota State University.
While I love teaching and researching, painting in the summer is a pleasant escape from the classroom. I generally work outside, where I can saw and paint and glue and frame without worrying about getting the house or the shed all dusty and speckly.
I also blog avidly about (mostly) South Dakota at the
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