(Photograph: Shannon Forsman)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck Forsman was born in Idaho in 1944 and raised in eastern Oregon and northern California. He received his B.A. in art in 1967 and his M.F.A. in painting 1971 from the University of California at Davis. Forsman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967 and sent to Vietnam in 1968–1969, where he served as an illustrator and photo correspondent and earned a Bronze Star Medal. After Vietnam he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1970 and in 1971 began to teach painting at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received three Faculty Fellowships and retired in 2008 as a professor of art. He has also received three National Endowment for the Arts grants, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and numerous other awards and honors. Forsman's work is included in more than twenty permanent collections, including the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Denver Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Wichita Art Museum, and Yellowstone Art Museum, among others. He has three published books: Arrested Rivers (University Press of Colorado, 1994), a book of his paintings that are critical of the over-damming of the West; Western Rider: Views from a Car Window (Center for American Places, 2003), a book of black-and-white photographs taken throughout the West; and Along Buddha's River (2011), a self-published book of color photographs taken by Forsman and his daughter, Shannon Forsman, while they followed the Mekong River from near its source on the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea. Chuck Forsman continues to produce paintings and photographs from his home in Boulder, Colorado, based on travels primarily in the American West and Southeast Asia. Mr. Forsman is credited with being among the first artists to link landscape painting and environmental issues.

ABOUT THE ESSAYIST

Eric Paddock, a fifth-generation Coloradoan, was born in Boulder in 1954 and raised there. He graduated from The Colorado College in 1976 and received his M.F.A. in photography from Yale University in 1982. Since 2008 he has been Curator of Photography at the Denver Art Museum, where he has organized solo exhibitions of work by Edward Ranney, Robert Benjamin, Garry Winogrand, Laura Letinsky, and Chuck Forsman, among others. Mr. Paddock also curated the Denver presentation of the Yale University Art Gallery's traveling exhibition, "Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs." From 1982 to 2008 he was Curator of Photography and Film at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, where he curated more than two dozen exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography about the American West. He is the author of Belonging to the West (Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1996), and his photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Mr. Paddock lives in Denver.