[9] Dolack's work often features whimsical animals in both a natural and artificial setting (such as a suburban living room), and has a worldwide following.
[7] His father had two sons from a previous marriage (Bob and Bill), while Mary gave birth to Monte and his sister, Marlene.
His design was a then-fashionable contemporary art work (similar to a Jackson Pollock image) which a teacher in 2006 later described as "flat-out ugly".
While an undergraduate (in the days before Microsoft PowerPoint), Dolack often drew charts and graphs for the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research, which turned his work into photographic slides.
[7] After graduation, Dolack was employed by the Anaconda Copper Company and was a member of "Out of Sight" (a rock band).
Among his most important early works is "Yahoo," which depicts a cowgirl on a horse and an anti-nuclear power symbol at the bottom.
The works feature animals "invading" human habitat, such as ducks swimming in a bathtub or a bear lying on the couch in a den in a house.
[12] The following year, Dolack—who was already "a nationally known poster artist"—produced the cover of the book, Wings to the Orient: Pan American Clipper Planes, 1935–1945: A Pictorial History.
[20] In 1990, Dolack donated a watercolor ("Restoring the Wolf to Yellowstone") depicting wolves looking over a plain of geysers and hot mud springs to the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, with sales of the poster going to a fund to compensate local ranchers for the loss of livestock incurred due to the reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park.
[5] That same year, his painting "Streamside," was featured on the cover of the academic work The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank.
[12] In December 2001, Dolack created a new work, the 23-by-34-inch (58 by 86 cm) "Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery at the White Cliffs of the Missouri," and donated it to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center near Black Eagle Dam on the Great Falls of the Missouri River.
[28] Posters of the work were used to raise money for the center, but it was sold for an undisclosed sum to First Interstate BancSystem three months later.
For the yearbook's 100th edition, Dolack contributed his recently completed "Montana Power"—which depicts a bison in a field of dry grass, with Square Butte in the background.
[33] Taken to St. Patrick Hospital and Health Sciences Center, Dolack underwent open-heart surgery, and a stent implanted in an artery to improve blood supply to his heart.
[36] Dolack says he has a large library of artistic reference works which he uses to improve his technique and to gain inspiration.
He once gained an idea for a woodpecker carrying a burning branch ("Stealing Fire") by seeing a rebroadcast of The Power of Myth, a television documentary featuring conversations between mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers.
To bring out the way in which fisherman "romance" fish from the water, another work depicts a man dancing with a gigantic rainbow trout.
His whimsical eye informs both our urban and rural stories, adding color, form and sharp lines to the obscure and chaotic vistas of real life.
"[12] Juxtaposition and paradox (a blue heron in an urban setting, fish leaping through a field of wheat) are two of the most common ways in which Dolack creates whimsy in his work.
Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, former director of the Montana Committee for the Humanities, says that Dolack's environmental message in the mid 1980s was subtle.
[12] But by the time of his 2000 work "Montana History Lesson," she notes, Dolack had opted for "overt" statements.