Art of the Pacific Northwest - The Art of Helena, Montana

Whimsical Sculpture

This is the fifth in the series. I remember visiting Helena years ago while my mother-in-law was living there, but I don't recall seeing much public art. What I do remember is the beautiful scenery, wide-open spaces, and wildlife.

I don't know if it's Helena's City motto, but I would love to see Take It Easy (by Kirsten Kainz) publicly displayed inside one of our traffic circles. What a great reason to slow down and wait for your turn to enter the circle! The shapes repeated in the sculptures are also circles. Montana's motto is actually, "Last Chance Gulch".

Helena, Montana sculptors Bill and Julie Ryder use rusted metal, scrap metal objects, driftwood, and stainless steel to create their magnificent horses. Driftwood and metal horse and colt #166, shown here without its colt, seems very comfortable in the surrounding Montana landscape. Her eye is made out of glass.

Murals

In 2017, graffiti artist, Ryan “ARCY” Christenson painted this mural of an old mustached miner panning for gold on this downtown Jackson Street parking garage. The other door has his hands and the pan.

Charles Marion Russell's 1918 mural entitled, Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians resides in the state capitol building. He was a painter, sculptor, and illustrator.

This partial map represents the location of the Native American tribes of Western Montana, with the starred state capital, Helena central to the region.

Paintings

Russell's 1918 painting Piegans fetched a whopping $5.6M in 2005. I wish I could see this painting in-person and would love to see how he painted the sagebrush in the foreground. The background is an excellent backdrop for highlighting the figures on horseback. They represent one of three Blackfoot tribes on their way to raid the Crows.

Rattle Snake Bear (1914), Scheuerle

One of Russell's friends who often accompanied him to the reservations was commercial artist and illustrator, Joesph Scheuerle (1873-1948). He painted over 200 watercolor portraits of the Native Americans he befriended. Behind each painting is a hand-written vignette about his subject.

Although artist Nancy Cawdrey is actually from Whitefish, Montana, I can't pass up the chance to share some of her work here. I enjoy her colorful paintings of Glacier National Park’s wildlife.

Cawdrey"s rendition of a bear about to catch a wild salmon is reminiscent of Thomas Mangelsen's photograph, Catch of the Day that I included in my recent Animal Art & Wildlife Photography post. I suppose that this is a moment that many photographers and artists live to capture in their art. 

Sculptor and oil painter, Greg Eiselein has been creating bronze sculpture and western landscapes his whole life, all of it in Montana. Once again, I am including a work that includes bales of hay in honor of my brother who enjoys the subject. This one, Distant Storm, is particularly dramatic in the top half. Although the horizon splits the painting in two, the sky itself is like a second painting with the storm cloud taking the upper third of the composition. Here, he doesn't quite apply the 'rule of thirds'.

Eiselein also produced this sculpture, honoring Edward Charles Abbott ("Teddy Blue"), a drover trailing longhorns from Texas to Montana. It was inspired by Abbott's book, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. As of June 2020, the artist continues to work on a life-size monument replicating Teddy Blue Abbott Crossing the Musselshell River.

Michael Blessing is actually from Bozeman, but I find his use of neon lights an interesting addition to his western portraits. Here's Clint Eastwood up in lights from, I'm assuming, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (it's actually a triptych -- the other two aren't shown).

Here's another of Blessing's portraits from the Montana Artists: Innovators, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs (MAP Exhibit) of the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell. It's almost like he's channeling Norman Rockwell with this painting of a young woman having her Morning Joe. I enjoy the contrasting colors he chose for the painting -- her red hair and chair back against the turquoise background and carpet opposite the green shoes. All the saturated colors, lines, and even the strong purple shadow serve to frame the otherwise delicately clothed pale subject. The background reminds me of that of a portrait studio like when we once sat for a formal school picture. The similar color of the cup unifies it with the background, and yet against the girl it is highlighted as the subject.

His wife, Meagan Abra Blessing also paints 'portraits' of western animal wildlife. I particularly like the expression on the wolf's face in the work she calls Gravity. And her paintings of horses are awesome as well.


                                                      

Robert F. Morgan, the assistant curator at the Montana Historical Society, was a realist painter from Helena who captured Montana history and wildlife until his death in 2015. He was known as an expert on the art of Charles Russell, who was also his mentor.

J.K. Ralston, born in Choteau, Montana, is an American painter of scenes from the Old West. His 1973 painting of the Women of the West documents a group of Montanan Native American women (tribe unknown) traveling across a Montana valley with pull poles carrying their loads. You can see wolves (dogs) also loaded up with their own pull poles. The emphasis is clearly on the lead woman and her horse with everything else paling off in the distance, except for that golden spot in the lower right corner.

So, which one of these artists is your favorite? It's hard for me to decide without seeing the works in-person. I guess I'll have to return to Helena and continue to explore its history and art.