Within moments, her arm appears on one table about 10 feet away, reconstituted in thin, slashing charcoal lines under the fast-moving hand of Kristi Hager. Nearby, McCourt's cheeks and neck emerge on a piece of newsprint taped to a piece of plywood by Linda Tawney. Meantime, across the room, Stephanie Frostad faces a wooden easel, feet planted firmly at shoulder width, one arm draped across her abdomen, the other slowly erasing the blankness from a sheet of white paper, uncovering McCourt's bare torso.
"I can't understand why Missoula is suddenly always the hottest place in Montana," muses Becki Johnson, speaking at once to everyone and no one in particular while she slowly massages the contours of McCourt's face into a page in a notebook.
Soft laughter ping-pongs around the room, followed by a brief but focused silence, scratched over by the soft sound of charcoal rubbing against paper.
Hager breaks the quietude and begins recounting an early experience of her professional art career. She was living in San Antonio, and she had rented a studio in an un-air conditioned room of a former factory. Working in the heat, she found that the oil pastels she was using began to melt in her hands.
"Sometimes your environment makes more of an impression on your work than you might think it would," says Hager.
"Mmm-hmm," murmer several of the artists; and McCourt - the flesh and blood McCourt, who until now has stood stock-still before the assembled group - nods knowingly.
If you know anything about the local community of artists, you probably recognize at least a few of their names: Nancy Erickson, Linda Tawney, Beth Lo, Leslie Van Stavern Millar, Shari Montana, Janet Whaley, Kristi Hager, Stephanie Frostad, Becki Johnson.
Though certainly not the only noteworthy female artists living in Missoula, these nine painters, ceramicists and textile artists belong on anybody's short list of the most respected and established artists - male or female - in this corner of the world.
What you may not recognize quite as readily is their collective name: the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon.
But if you want to understand what has influenced each of these artists to improve, expand and keep producing work over the years, you'd do well to consider that studio up Pattee Canyon - where, for 18 years now, Nancy Erickson has hosted a group of women artists for twice-a-month figure drawing sessions.
Erickson, a fabric artist whose evocative textiles depicting wolves and mountain lions are coveted by art collectors around the West, says she first decided to host a drawing group at her studio after participating in a similar but shorter-lived group hosted by former Missoula artist Patricia Forsberg, back in the 1980s.
"Patricia decided to go to Italy, and I had really enjoyed her drawing group; so I decided to start a group with some of the same artists here at my own studio," explains Erickson.
"I find the practice of drawing the human figure to be really important to the discipline of creating art, and I recognized that I was the best-equipped to host this kind of gathering."
Indeed, Erickson's studio is the kind of space that would turn most artists green with envy. A vaulting, 700-square-foot space flooded by natural light, the studio offers plenty of room for artists to spread out and work - even with Erickson's own artwork, sewing machines, and materials still scattered around the room.
One of the first artists invited to participate in Erickson's group was Beth Lo, a ceramicist who had recently been hired as an art professor at the University of Montana.
"I had known about the group that Nancy and Patricia had been doing and I had always thought, what a neat thing and I wish I could do that twice a month," recalls Lo. "So when Nancy asked me, I was excited because it was a group with all the artists I'd really admired around town."
Indeed, from the very beginning of the group, the list of participating artists read like a Who's-Who of local women artists. At first, membership was loose; invited artists would simply show up on the appointed dates with a little money to help pay for the model.
But then, something nobody had really expected began to happen. The Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon began to evolve into something more than just a regularly scheduled drawing session.
Millar and Montana work side by side during the modeling session.
"Everybody, I wanted to let you know that Janet has a physical therapy appointment today, so she may not be able to make it," announces Nancy Erickson as she double-traces one of Maureen McCourt's arms in thick, ropey lines on a pad of paper.
Janet is Janet Whaley, who recently broke her ankle.
"The good news is, she said she was able to walk down the stairs - not one step at a time, but the normal way," adds Erickson.
"Oh, that's good," chimes Shari Montana, laboring over her own pad of paper in a corner of the room.
"Hey, I know this is kind of off the subject and might not be something we're all interested in," says Leslie Millar. "But I've been following this wolf issue, and there's a meeting in Helena this week that I'm going to go to so that I can make a comment. I was thinking I'd like to take some kind of letter, maybe something from whoever is comfortable signing it as part of this group."
The conversation meanders on: through the hot-button issue of animal trapping, to discussion of the new Harry Potter movie and Michael Moore's "Sicko," to forest fires, to the reporting style of NPR's Nina Totenberg, and back to the heat again.
In the first two hours of drawing (sessions last two and a half hours), the longest stretch of silence is no more than a minute.
"I like quiet when I'm drawing, actually," laughs Erickson in a phone conversation some days later. "But I've learned so much from other people about art and movies to go see and books to read from our conversations."
That's the thing that nobody really seems to have expected those 18 years ago; yet in a way, it seems to be one of the primary reasons why the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon has endured.
It is an opportunity for these artists - who are used to working alone, in silence - to feel like part of a bigger community.
"Under normal circumstances, most of us work in isolation in our own studios," says Millar. "So to have an opportunity to be reminded that your peer group is out there, is intelligent and friendly and cooperative and has interesting artistic ideas, that's really great."
"I think one of the most important aspects about this group is that we're committed and comfortable with each other," agrees Kristi Hager. "So that allows us to talk about what's on our minds and talk about art and share opportunities for showings that we might not otherwise know about."
As curator of the Missoula Art Museum and a born-and-raised Montana native, Steve Glueckert has a pretty expansive view of the Missoula art scene. He has seen galleries come and go, seen artists move in and out of town. An artist himself, he knows how hard it is to maintain a focus on creating art in a community where it's hard enough making ends meet with a wage-earning job.
For all those reasons, he sees the longevity of the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon as something to be celebrated.
"What I think is pretty remarkable is that they've been at it for so many years," says Glueckert. "People talk about the issue of doing art in isolation, and it's especially an issue in the American West; that's one of the reasons people leave graduate school and the fruit dies on the vine, they stop doing art. It seems pretty evident that the camaraderie keeps (the members of the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon) going and inspires them. Each of those artists has a vital career and shows outside this region and their work is so significantly different from each other's, so it's all the more remarkable that they've been able to keep getting along and pushing each other.
"It's a great example to all of us artists."
When you really drill down to the heart of what keeps the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon active, it isn't the size of the studio, or even the artists' shared passion for feminist, environmentalist, and artistic concerns.
Most of the artists involved ultimately point to a single, determining factor in the group's longevity: Nancy Erickson herself.
"Nancy is kind of a Girl Scout leader at heart, and we're her Brownie pack," says Leslie Millar. "We're lucky. If she hadn't taken that role the group would have come unwound eventually."
Beth Lo notes that she was struck by a thought about Erickson at the recent memorial for celebrated Missoula artist Rudy Autio.
"After Rudy's memorial, I was thinking a lot about the description of him as being so generous and having such integrity and having this unshakable civility; and Nancy is another person in that vein," says Lo. "She always makes people feel invited and there's this generosity of spirit with her, this mood at the group, that just keeps us all coming back and participating."
Reflected in a series of mirrors, Linda Tawney, Stephanie Frostad, Shari Montana and Leslie Van Stavern Millar use a variety of media while working in Nancy Erickson's sunlit studio in Pattee Canyon during a recent meeting of the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon.
For her part, Erickson ducks such praise. Oh, sure, she spends a couple hours before and after each biweekly meeting of the group, cleaning up and making cookies and rearranging her studio so there's room for all the artists to work.
But, she figures, she's got the time, so why shouldn't she do it?
"I don't do a lot of political action anymore, I don't run like I used to, I'm just doing my own artwork," says Erickson. "So it's more convenient for me to do all that stuff than anybody else. (Cleaning up) is part of the deal, and I just love having people draw here."
So Nancy Erickson keeps inviting the eight other official members of the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon to her studio, month after month. She keeps baking those brownies and finding models for the group. Once a year, the group organizes a joint public showing (the next show opens Aug. 23 from 5-8 p.m. at the Brunswick Building in Missoula).
Despite the work that goes into it, Erickson says the reward is worth it in the end.
"I can't imagine life without drawing group," she says. "I intend to keep it together as long as I can."
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