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ARTIST
David Dibble

TITLE
Last Year’s Fort

DATE
2018

MEDIUM
Oil on linen panel

DIMENSIONS
48 x 48 in.

LOCATION
Level 3, Northeast Lounge

Original barn located in Eden, UT

In many ways, barns and libraries are similar. They are places of storage, of safety, of refuge. They are receptacles and dispensers of nourishment. They are tangible examples of the efforts of those who have gone before us. They connect us to a collective past.

As a boy growing up on a small farm, I loved making little “forts”—my own places of refuge and nourishment—using whatever I could scrounge up. Sometimes during the winter, I would stumble upon a pile of lumber and a tarp tucked away somewhere and realize that it was the fort from the previous summer. Separated from the moment of imaginative play that created it, and lacking leaves and weeds for added shelter, the fort seemed stark, foreign, and not as well constructed as I remembered. But I would usually sit there for a spell in the cold winter light, watch my breath, listen to train whistles float across the frozen fields, and imagine warmer days.

Born in 1977, David Dibble was raised on a farm in Davis County, Utah, where he was influenced by the landscape from an early age. He completed a BFA in illustration at Brigham Young University and began landscape painting in earnest in graduate school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After he graduated from the Academy, he and his wife moved to New York, where he worked as a color artist for Blue Sky Studios, creating Concept Design for such films as Rio, Epic, Ice Age 4, Peanuts, and Ferdinand. David taught illustration in the Department of Design at Brigham Young University and paints often in the surrounding mountains and valleys, focusing largely on agricultural themes. He lives with his family in Utah.