Museum features women's views of Glacier
Numerous events throughout the area are paying homage to Glacier National Park's centennial, but one that will begin in Bigfork on Friday will provide something different than others — the views and recordings of three local female artists.
"Glacier Park: A Woman's Perceptive" will feature the works of Marsha Davis, Karen Leigh and Jeanette Rehahn at the Bigfork Museum of Art & History throughout the month of July. All three artists used a different medium to depict the Park over the course of the past year.
This is the second exhibit in a series called "Celebrating a Summer of Women" at the museum.
All three of the artists are members of the Bigfork Museum and have been part of shows or held prior shows of their work in the Village.
Of the three, Davis has been painting the Park regularly the longest — at least 40 years.
"I really love mountains. I just love being out in nature," Davis said. "Just about everything in Glacier National Park is my favorite thing to paint."
All of her oil paintings for this show are recent and depict scenes throughout the Park. One of the highlights for her is a painting of St. Mary Valley with flowers in bloom.
Leigh has also lived and painted in the Valley for 40 years, much of that with Davis. The two, along with fellow artist Corinne Lundgren, traveled around Montana to "Paint the State" and put on exhibits of the paintings from those excursions.
Leigh works in watercolors. She's painted the Park before, but not often.
Leigh said she found that she preferred the east side of the Park with McDonald Lake and Chief Mountain, where she found a wider variety of color than the typical greens and blues.
One of her favorites in her collection in this show is a painting of Iceberg Lake.
"It's really simple. The shapes are graphic," Leigh said. "It's a bold statement."
In comparison to the other two, Rehahn is a newcomer to the Valley. Rehahn, who works with pastels, actually has not met or worked with the other two women before.
Rehahn has been a working artist since her 20s, mostly doing technical illustrations and some graphic design work in California.
"People just kept saying, 'Just hurry up,'" Rehahn said of that style of work. "I saw that I was going to be trapped. I wanted to be free. Aside from that, I just wasn't living up to myself."
It was local icon Elna Darrow who brought Rehahn to the Village when Darrow was interested in some of the gourd work Rehahn was doing.
"I said, 'This is it. This is where I want to be,'" Rehahn said. "And then I thought how can I live here and not express the beauty of this place?"
Rehahn discovered a love for pastels through a book titled "The Poetic Landscape" by Elizabeth Mowry.
"Fifteen pages in, the hair on my body stood up. This is what I'm going to do," Rehahn said of the experience. It was then that she decided to depict area landscapes and to use pastels. "Literally I've been painting since I moved up here and I've never stopped since."
Rehahn said she was limited in what images of Glacier she could paint because, not being a hiker, she had to stick to the roads. The weather this year also posed a challenge — the fall didn't have its usual colors and winter never brought much snow, she said.
Though some of her paintings do feature the mountains, Rehahn said she also found beauty in the smaller details of Glacier — grass in the East Fork and a rock near Bowman Lake. She said she would have liked to do even more paintings of the Park than she did for this show.
"Sometimes we're looking at the grandeur and so we miss the wonder that sometimes is closer to the ground," Rehahn said.
An opening reception for the show will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 2, and is open to the public.The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The next and final exhibit in the series will be "Not Your Grandmother's Needle Art," opening Aug. 10. The show features work by Paula Johnson and Regina Browne.
For more information, visit http://bigforkmuseum.org or call 837-6927.