To contemplate Amanda Krolczyk’s art—made of reclaimed wood, cut and painted into nature scenes—is to be drawn in by the scale, then enthralled by the details. Her pieces typically have a broad frame, evoking a reliquary—an ornate container designed to hold something sacred. And for her, that something sacred is nature itself.
“I’ve always had this feeling that when you are in these indescribably beautiful places, you lose bits and pieces of your soul, like you leave them there, and you are called back to that place,” said Amanda, who founded Plaid Beaver in 2017 right here in Missoula. “I’m trying to capture some of those really big things in art, and compact it into these little things that a pilgrim and a worshipper of these wild places can come and experience. So if you can bring a little piece of that place with you, maybe you visit your soul in that space.”
This connection to the sacred made Amanda’s art a perfect choice for the Windham family, looking to create a memorial for their mom who had recently passed away. Amanda’s piece depicts Big Mountain in Whitefish, where the family liked to ski together, and the mom’s skis frame the art.
“What’s cool about it is you look at it and you know exactly what mountain it is, you know those runs,” said Sam Windham. “She’s very good about being specific in her work. She even asked what time of day. I think she was trying to figure out sun angles, which is crazy, because it’s wood.”
“She also asked us if there were any runs to highlight, and my mom was a big fan of Chair Two, which just so happens to be an area of the mountain you can see from the valley,” added Matt Windham. “She did a very good job highlighting those important runs to our family.”
Attention to detail is a theme that runs through Amanda’s work. She sketches out each work to size on cardboard. She cuts and sands each wood piece, then uses the cardboard to lay out the wood, ideally following the directionality of the landscape.
“I like to mimic the geomorphology with the wood,” she said. “The material speaks louder.”
She paints the wood using an acrylic wash technique in which, similar to watercolors, acrylic paint is diluted with water to create translucent layers of color. Her largest piece to date was around 20 feet by 15 feet. She had to cut it in half to transport it and she tries not to go smaller than a 12-inch square. “Mountains start losing their grandeur,” she said.
Most of Amanda’s art is of real-life landscapes. Locally, she has done pieces depicting Glacier and Yellowstone and the Big Sky and Livingston areas.
“A place that someone longs to be all the time, and I can kind of give them a piece of it,” she said. “Those are the special ones for me.”
Internationally, the Dolomites, Patagonia, Zermatt, and South Africa have featured. She recently had a show in San Francisco, so she did some pieces of that region. And the desert has been a recent focus.
“The sky is a totally different color in the desert, it’s so cool,” she said.
Amy York, a fellow Missoula-based artist, noted that some of Amanda’s more recent work showcases her ability to create a strong foreground, middle ground, and background.
“She’ll do flowers up close, and then the water, and the mountains,” Amy said. “Her ability to figure out that scale in a way that’s really picturesque is remarkable. Doing that makes you want to walk up to it. Large-scale things people want to step back from, and hers are really an invitation to step toward it.”
Amanda’s devotion to nature extends not only to the landscapes she depicts in her art but the way she creates her art, too.
“None of the wood is new,” Amy said. “It’s something that would otherwise be discarded. She takes these old pieces and she’s giving them a second purpose. It’s really elevating and showing the natural beauty, which is what her work is about in the whole sense.”
Amanda doesn’t want sustainability to necessarily be the first thing a viewer thinks of when seeing her art, however.
“I want people to be attracted by it first, and then drawn in by that impact,” she said. “You can make these beautiful pieces out of trash, and show people that it doesn’t deserve to be thrown away, and make them think harder about what is trash versus what is still beautiful. The power of art is changing people’s minds without bashing them over the head."
“I’ve always loved the discarded and the things that have been pushed aside,” she went on. “Rusting metal, peeling paint, torn fabric. This material has lived a whole life before me, and it’s so interesting to me. Anything that’s written on I don’t want to cover up with paint, because it’s like that wood’s history, and life.”
The business name Plaid Beaver is also a nod to our environment.
“I love beavers—it’s such an integral animal to me, and then it feels kind of fitting for something in woodworking,” Amanda said. “They’re just like North America’s savior. If we reintroduce these animals into the West we could potentially save our ecosystem.”
An artist’s ecosystem also needs tending, and Amanda has found a supportive community in her family. Her husband and mother-in-law help her with the business side of Plaid Beaver, she uses tools she inherited from her grandfather, and various other family members work with her in her studio or at shows and, more broadly, here in Missoula.
“I love the arts in Missoula. I have so many friends who are unbelievably talented artists,” she said. “To do a very hard thing, which is be an artist, be a business owner, be a parent, in community with people who get it, is so powerful.”
Amy echoed her.
“Having other mothering artists around you is really important because creativity is something that is really hard to access when your attention is consistently fractured, and there’s nothing that fractures attention more than becoming a parent,” she said.
Amanda has also been part of the wider Missoula arts community through her time working at Opportunity Resources, where she taught art classes to adults with disabilities.
“I was there for four years and loved it,” she said. “Working with my clients and making the work they wanted to make was so fulfilling.”
At the time, Amanda was focusing on ceramics, a medium she still works in and which is what first drew her to art, while she was initially pursuing a pre-med major at University of Montana.
“I was like, this is what I was supposed to be doing my whole life. Oh, this is where I have been searching for. This is where I belong,” she said. “The life, the other path, I don’t know how that could have been as full as the one that I’m lucky enough to have stumbled down.”
Plaid Beaver Co.
Browse Amanda's work and subscribe to her email list at PlaidBeaver.co
"You can make these beautiful pieces out of trash, and show people that it doesn’t deserve to be thrown away, and make them think harder about what is trash versus what is still beautiful." - Amanda Krolczyk
“To do a very hard thing, which is be an artist, be a business owner, be a parent, in community with people who get it, is so powerful.” - Amanda Krolczyk