Tricia Opstad is an artist, dancer and painter who grew up in North Dakota and currently lives and works in Missoula, Montana. Tricia makes drawings, paintings, performance, and dances. Tricia plays saxophone in a noise band. She pulls from her skills and training as a dancer using embodiment practices in her visual work. She responds from sensation, emotion, movement, and desire in combination with crafted techniques in composition and style. Tricia’s connection with the land and daily meditations in nature strongly influence her work.

Phenomenology says our very existence is established and maintained only through mutual and inseparable relationship with the world. I respond to the natural world and my living body experience, which translates to body memory and sensory maps for painting in the studio. In “Eye and Mind”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows how schemes for visibility, captured in our flesh, are at the origin of that productive and motor imagination that moves the hand of the painter.