It's been weeks since the last western Montana rainfall, but on this blustery day, with wind nearly toppling his easel and thick raindrops smacking his umbrella, the Russian artist carefully painted the Blackfoot River wending through the valley below him. The sky hung low with socked-in gray clouds, but Afonin's brushes painted a colorful vista.
“Art is joyous, even on a gray day,” said Afonin, through his translator and friend Bruce Ford.
The Paint Out brings some of the best artists in the Northwest to Missoula every year. But the presence of Afonin, who hails from Kras Noyarsk, Siberia, brings an international flavor to the event for the first time.
Afonin came to the United States after meeting Ford, who was working in Russia as a translator and came across his works in two art galleries.
“I tracked him down,” Ford said. “We tried getting a visa twice, but he got turned down twice. This last time, he finally got a visa.”
Afonin's abstract landscape will be among 120 or so works the Dana Gallery will exhibit next month. The artists spend six days in western Montana, inspired to create their works by painting in various locations around the region.
Tuesday's location for many of the artists, including Afonin, was the Blackfoot Valley Ranch, a secluded homestead two miles south of Ovando.
As the clouds moved in and the rain grew from a patter to a downpour, sculptor Joe Helko found refuge by hunkering underneath the lip of a barn roof.
Helko, of Choteau, called himself the “token sculptor” of the Paint Out.
Scooping up little handfuls of petroleum wax, Helko added layers, texture and detail to his sandhill crane, a work that was inspired by viewing the birds in their natural habitat on Monday.
It's refreshing, he said, to get outdoors. Normally, sculptors work indoors. But being outside provides its own inspiration.
“You can get bogged down in a studio,” said Helko, who has created and sold his work as a professional sculptor since 1975. “I like to be outside, to get out and get ideas, observe things and take them back to the studio. That's the bad thing about being a sculptor - you're always locked indoors.”
Helko will eventually bronze his sandhill crane and the other sculptures he's created throughout the Paint Out.
After the Paint Out, Afonin will continue his travels around the West. Ford will take him to Glacier National Park, and also to the Seattle area to get a chance to paint Mount Rainier.
Yet the terrain isn't all that unfamiliar to the artist.
“Montana is really a beautiful state, but I like it particularly because I find a lot similar to the part of Siberia I live in,” Afonin said.
Gallery owner Dudley Dana said the Paint Out is one of his business's most important events, and gives him the opportunity to keep close with the artists who exhibit works in his gallery.
“The people in the Paint Out are exceptional artists, but also exceptional people,” he said. “They're fantastically easy to deal with.”
Reporter Jamie Kelly can be reached at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
Looking good
The Western Montana Paint Out exhibit will be on display at the Dana Gallery, 248 N. Higgins Ave. in Missoula, during August. More than 120 works will be on sale. The opening of the show takes place on First Friday, Aug. 1, from 5 to 8 p.m.
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