Her shoes are off, feet in the icy cold, shoulders hunched, hand a blur, pen pulling ink fast across thin parchment. Everything seems quiet and still, yet everything is in motion - hand, eye, mind, wave, wind. It is as if this place is breathing, steadily in and out, measured by the constant rhythm of the waves.
“It's very peaceful,” she says. “I usually just keep to my little cove when I'm working.”
She's working on a loon, a water bird so wholly adapted to lake life that it can't even walk on land. To draw a loon, you must come to it, on its terms, here at water's edge.
In her notebook are mice and bats and pine martens, weasels and birds and a big old moose. They, like the loon, have been carved carefully by this environment, anatomies chiseled by the constant hammer of deep time and natural selection's keen edge.
They are a perfect fit, the critters and the place, and there is beauty in that seamless dovetailed match. Just as there is beauty in art on this page, where Seay like nature herself creates the animals once more.
“It's an inspiration to be out here,” she says. “I'm big on science, but I know my calling's in art. So I found a way to put them together.”
The nation's parks have been bringing artists and nature's inspiration together for years now, with nearly 30 parks participating in the artist-in-residence program, from Acadia to Yosemite. The artists get a place to live (and, in Glacier, a canister of pepper spray). In return, the parks get art hewn from the landscape, as perfect a fit as that loon on the lake.
For centuries, Native Americans and Europeans have found artistic inspiration in the place now known as Glacier Park, expressing their understanding of and relationship to place through painting and poetry, folklore, photography, sacred dance and sculpture.
The whole notion of protected national parks, in fact, was driven in no small part by the artistic works of photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran, who captured Yellowstone long before it was called Yellowstone.
Later, when the Great Northern Railway - which built many of Glacier's early accommodations - looked to advertise western routes, it looked again to artists, inviting them to live and work and steep themselves in Glacier.
John Fery came. So did Kathryn Leighton and Winold Reiss.
They paved the way for a undeniable tradition of art in this park, a history that includes the likes of Charlie Russell, who spent nearly 20 summers on the shore of Lake McDonald a century ago.
“I want my art to have meaning,” says Seay.
It's the same shore Seay's dipping her toes into today.
“Art and this setting just seem to work together,” said Laura Law.
Law's not an artist, not even a naturalist. She's a teacher.
She's also education specialist for Glacier Park, and this year, for the first time ever, she helped pick the season's visiting artists, even told them what to do.
“The thing is,” Law said, “we didn't have any non-copyrighted line drawings of the park's flora and fauna.”
What she needed was something she could use in the curriculum she's built for teachers of the 5,000 or so school kids who come here on field trips each year. What she needed was a coloring book.
Seay's work focuses on the “small things that keep everything going.”
If Seay could render a long-eared bat so a kid could color it, then Law could send photocopies home with teachers, alongside a curriculum about, say, bat migration. If Seay could capture a shrew in pencil and ink, kids could color it in while learning about that subnivian world beneath winter's weight.
A lot of artists applied for the residency, Law said, but Seay - with her background in scientific illustration, her work in environmental education, her emphasis on technical line drawing - well, she fit the niche as if evolved to fill it.
Kids can string together the pictures into a food chain. Or they can create three-dimensional dioramas, with shrews under cottonball snowpack, pine martins on top, owls hunting above.
“Really, I was just trying to provide teachers materials they didn't have to pay for,” Law said.
And Seay, for her part, was really just looking for a home in the park she didn't have to pay for.
These last three summers, Seay said, she's been traveling from Georgia to work at a café on the park's eastern edge, a college-years gig she first found through friends. On her days off, she said, she'd hike and climb and sketch.
But what she really wanted was a way to come to Glacier for art, not for the café. She'd almost given up that dream “when I stumbled on this program.”
It has pretty much everything she was looking for. It's a job in Glacier, drawing animals, for kids, aimed at environmental education.
“I could do this for the rest of my life and be a very, very happy person,” Seay said. “This is my dream job. I want my art to have meaning.”
And these stripped-down line drawings, while not as remarkably detailed as her preferred work with botanical illustrations, are thick with purpose.
“I think it's really important for the upcoming generations to learn what I don't feel like I was taught,” Seay said. “Some of these creatures are going out of existence. There won't be any glaciers pretty soon in Glacier National Park. My art, I want it to serve a purpose.”
And so she comes to the loon to sketch the loon, to the glacier to re-create the glacier lily, to a drafty log cabin to make portraits of the mice who live there.
She doesn't exactly say as much, but it's clear this place is working on her, just as it has molded the native life, just as she is working on it, reconstructing it, translating it for the next generation of inhabitants and stewards. Here Seay has time - time to sketch and to be where these animals live, to create them in the place that created them, and to be created by it, as well.
How would the hair raise and ruffle in this pose or that? How would the feathers lie at rest? In flight?
Her focus, for now, is on the “small things that keep everything going,” the bottom links of the food chain, the mouse that feeds the pine marten that feeds the predator and the scavenger.
“I could do this kind of work anywhere,” Seay admits, “but being here makes you realize just how important it is. When you're actually out here in the field” - she's knee-deep now, skipping stones into the wind - “well, there's just so much more connection to what you're doing.”
Setting aside her notebook, Seay relaxes and skips rocks across the lake's surface. “I could do this for the rest of my life and be a very, very happy person,” she says.
Seay is working on the boundary, right at water's edge, on the line between the shrew and the rendering of the shrew, between what is known and what is not and what still must be learned.
“That it's for kids makes it so much more meaningful,” she said. “It sounds trite, but nature's my muse.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
Photographer Kurt Wilson can be reached at 523-5270 or at kwilson@missoulian.com.
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