Small-town sports ...

Here's a photo I took last fall, showing a slice of small-town Montana life. The scene was a football game between the Grass Range/Winnett Rangers and the Highwood Mountaineers. Though the Rangers played very hard, there were only eight of them, half of whom were freshmen ... and so Highwood won in a blowout.

Ceretana ...

I'm a big fan of historic signs, and here's one that I photographed last fall ... this is on the wall of the old Milwaukee Road depot in the town of Grassrange. "Ceretana" was a trademark of the Montana Flour Mills Company, which advertised, "It Pays to Feed Ceretana Feeds."

Sheep ranching ...

After my last post I remembered that I needed to say one more thing about Bill Stockton: he was also an author. In 1983 Stockton published a little volume of brief essays and thin pencil sketches, called Today I Baled Some Hay to Feed the Sheep the Coyotes Eat. It's an inauspicious title, but easily one of the most insightful books ever written about Montana's open spaces and ranch life ... a highly recommended read.

Here's my favorite paragraph from the book, and one of the volumes sketches:

I have no answers to the cruelities of nature on one hand and all her joys on the other; why she has devised so many ways to continue life and just as many ways to destroy it. I often wonder as I watch nature work if death is nothing more than a means of filling life with anticipation, and if life is merely a brief game of hide and seek.

Village in Winter ...

Here's a Bill Stockton painting for today ... a good representation of his later work. It's called "Village in Winter," and was painted in 1993. Like many of his pieces, it's now in the permanent collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum.

Bill Stockton ...

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm a fan of traditional "Western" art ... the Charlie Russell sort of stuff that nearly everyone associates with Montana. It's unfortunate, though, that the genre has become a cliché ... because it's cost western art some of its respect, and because it's saddled the broader Montana art community with a stereotype that doesn't always fit. Our state has a very diverse creative legacy -- even among those who live the ranch life, it's much more than just cowboy art.

One of the artists that last statement brings to mind is a man named Bill Stockton. Bill Grew up in the country around Grassrange and Winnett, and then served in the Army in World War II. He used his GI Bill money to attend art school, and then headed off to Paris ... but then after a year, he came back to Grassrange and spent the rest of his life as a sheep rancher. He kept painting, though, and by the end of his life he had a devoted Montana following. His work was abstract and often spare, evoking the central Montana landscapes in poignant and characteristic ways.

Bill died in 2002, and was later eulogized in a poem by Rick Newby which reads, in part:

Even at the end, his line unfailing,
he painted without stinting. And we are pierced:
By tenderness, by a quiet intensity
of yearning we can scarcely bear.

This is a shot someone took of Bill out on his ranch in the 1970s ... next time, I'll give you an example of his work.