“Kindred Spirits” is just one of a selection of Baude’s wolf paintings. PHOTO COURTESY OF CREIGHTON BLOCK GALLERY
AN A RT I S T A N S W ER S
THE CALL OF THE WILD BY SARAH GIANELLI
Painter Virginie Baude remembers the moment wolves captured her imagination. She was six years old and a mobile library came to her small town in the south of France. She came across an edition of the Jack London classic “The Call of the Wild” with an image of a howling wolf on the cover.
Program that gave foreigners the opportunity to work in the U.S. for five months and travel for another two.
Baude’s fascination with wolves never left her, and fueled a dream to live in Yellowstone National Park and study the animal in its natural habitat.
She was ecstatic, but her parents were not. She had a master’s degree and was going to bus tables?
She pursued this end by earning a master’s degree in wildlife biology from a French university, but remained uncertain about how she would make her dream a reality. But getting to Yellowstone turned out to be a matter of serendipity. A college friend told her about the J-1 Visa 88 Explore Yellowstone explorebigsky.com
Baude applied to numerous national parks, and the only one she received a job offer from was Yellowstone.
“I didn’t care,” Baude said. “All I wanted to do was go to Yellowstone—if I had to start at the bottom, I was going to do that.” She didn’t get any closer to working with wolves, but returned for a second season anyway, and began sketching in her free-time.
