Tara Kraft loves paint. And ink. And rocks. She thinks of her work as geology in fast-forward, allowing the characteristics of a material to interact with her intentions in an ever-alluring play of forces. This play connects her personally to time, nature, and our place within them.

Kraft studied painting and illustration at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon. Her work has been shown at Gallery Mack, Collective Visions Gallery, Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, and the Kirkland Arts Center, and published in Art Seen and Floresta Magazine. In 2022 she was the Artist-in-Residence at Capulin Volcano National Monument.

Kraft draws inspiration from the beauty of her home in the American Pacific Northwest, where she enjoys hiking, skiing, foraging, and meeting new rocks.

Rocks are waymarks in time. They orient us in a vast expanse of millennia and offer a comparative scale to understand how small human existence is. From our perspective they are solid and unmoving, but they tell stories of change. Kraft paints these silent storytellers by building up many layers of paint, sometimes scraping areas back to bring out texture and allow earlier layers to peak through; a process that echoes the geologic formation of many rocks.

In geology, an erratic is a rock that is different from the bedrock on which it rests. They can be any size. In this painting the spatial scale is obscured, allowing the viewer to imagine a great boulder set above cliffs or a pebble in the sand. How big are we compared to this rock? How big is our lifetime compared to the lifetime of this rock?

Kraft encountered these rocks on the trail to Snow Lake, the most visited lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The views from the trail are well known and abundant on social media. Instead of that traditional grand vista, these paintings offer intimate portraits of small moments that are easily overlooked. In 2022 the deteriorating effects of so many feet prompted the trail's closure to remediate the damage and serve the needs of an increasing number of visitors. Explosives were used to redefine the trail and some of these rocks have been destroyed; an inevitable process that has now been accelerated to a human timescale rather than a geologic one.