Enjoy a complimentary scoop of ice cream, coffee and select Pride of Dakota snacks. Meet Williston Area Artist Daphne JohnsonClark and tour her exhibit titled “Badlands,” currently on display at the Gallery at the Long X Arts Center.. Then shop The Merc for Pride of Dakota products, gift items and locally made art, crafts, fresh flowers and more!

Plus! Sign up for Daphne’s Landscape Oil Painting Class at 2 PM.

Daphne JohnsonClark was born and raised in rural North Dakota only three miles from the Montana border. Her grandparents had a ranch 10 miles from her childhood home. She spent the majority of her childhood at their ranch; chasing cows, building fences, milking cows and helping check for spring calves.

She received in a Bachelors degree in Biology in 2003 and has spent the time since then working as Environmental Health Practitioner working to protect the area where she was raised. Over the years she has watched as the ranching life in ND and MT has disappeared.In 2010, she was drawn to start painting when a friend introduced her to oil paint as a medium. It was then she discovered she could easily spend fulfilling hours mixing paint colors and manipulating the paints on the canvas with different brushes, strokes and the pallet knife. The fluidity and versatility of this new to her medium had her hooked. In 2012, she enrolled at the Academy of Art University to pursue a Masters in Fine Art. It is a natural fit to bring together her background and love for ranching and the outdoors into her painting. She believes there is a rough beauty to this area that few people get to enjoy as the population remains classified as frontier, which is less than six people per square mile. Most of these counties have an average density of two people per square mile. There is a story in these rural areas just waiting to be told to the rest of the world and she wants to be one of the people telling that story.