She was his Venus, his goddess of love and beauty.
The painting, titled "Welcome," like much of Ernie Pepion's work, reveals something perhaps a little beyond the nationally exhibited artist's reach, yet accurately reflects the crippled man's pains, needs and desires.
"Yes."
"Can you see the mountains?"
"Yes."
"Can you see the buffalo?"
"I just see a bunch of people."
With those last words, he left behind an empty wheelchair. And so began his journey to the Spirit World.
Fifteen years earlier, Pepion, or Eewokso, painted "They Come at Night," a scene in which he envisioned his own death. In that picture, his Indian Venus sat atop a white steed, below the foot of his bed, a few feet from his crippled legs, while his father held his hand, and his mother and an ancestral chief looked on.
Pepion - a rodeo cowboy, rancher, veteran and baseball hat-wearing artist - spent the last 33 years painting from a wheelchair after an auto accident left him able to move only his thumbs. Yet he defied his limitations.
A fellow veteran taught him to paint. The Blackfeet man went on to earn a master's degree in fine arts from Montana State University in Bozeman. Since then, his art has been awarded and honored, including art exhibits from Japan to the U.S. Capitol rotunda. On Jan. 3, he received the 2005 Montana Governor's Award for the Arts in Helena.
In the final year of his life, Pepion's body finally began to break down.
"People were in denial about his mortality," said Steve Glueckert, exhibit curator at the Missoula Art Museum. The common thought was, "He's not going to die. There's just no way."
To many, Pepion seemed larger than life. He painted that way, too.
"Painting allows me to be a person beyond the limitations of racial prejudice and disability," said the artist in a Missoula Art Museum "Dreams on Wheels" exhibit catalog. He said he was often "pitied and belittled" for being Indian, and later as a quadriplegic.
A paintbrush made him invincible.
On canvas, he became a buffalo, butting his wheelchair high into the air. In other scenes, a stick pony became part of his wheelchair in which the rider wins horse races, or rides his chair along the Rocky Mountain Front, or effortlessly rides to a mountaintop where he sips a can of soda.
But for a man who thought large, he also felt overwhelming despair. And he unleashed those thoughts on canvas, too. "My work does more than document my life, it expresses my feelings," he said. Women and children in his paintings tell of an "unfulfilled dream for family."
His Red Man Series, a collection of 12 paintings, revealed despair. "There were some people who couldn't be in the same room with those paintings, it made them cry," said Renee Taaffe, a former teacher who attended the 2001 museum exhibit. "I think some people were offended by his brutal honesty."
Lucy Lippard, art critic, theorist and author, has compared Pepion's use of imagery to artist Frida Kahlo, "the great Mexican artist who similarly transcended pain through creativity." The artist's husband, Diego Rivera, has described his wife's paintings as "agonized poetry on canvas."
In his painting, "A Good Way to Die," Pepion's self-portrait shows an aged, white-haired man dying, lying in a fetal position - holding a paintbrush in each hand. That was the way he wanted to die, he told family.
In January, Steven Powell stared out the hospital room window to a shop across the street. His uncle wouldn't live much longer. "I ran to the nearest store . . . I was just afraid that he was going to go before . . . I was trying to hurry . . . ."
When he got back to the room, he handed a paintbrush to his aunt. "Elouise gave it to him, and he grasped it," said Powell.
Holding that brush, he completed his circle in life.
Pepion was buried on the Blackfeet Reservation, where he used to ranch and rodeo and enjoy a few beers and the company of a woman.
Cobell said she can easily imagine him in the Spirit World.
"I think he's on that white horse, probably on double with that beautiful lady, and they're probably riding around in that tall green grass . . . that's where he's at," said Cobell. "He's living it all."
Reach reporter Jodi Rave at 1-800-366-7186 or at jodi.rave@missoulian.com
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