Natural inspiration

It was late one night when Jim Clayborn heard a ruckus outside his cabin.

He thought maybe it was a deer or a pack rat. The noise was loud, but Clayborn was tired. He had been hiking the day before. He fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning he awoke to find the outside of his cabin vandalized.

“It chewed and scratched up the cabin,” Clayborn said.

A sub-adult grizzly (a fact he would later confirm with a bear researcher) had visited him in the middle of the night.

“There were mud prints on the cabin,” he said. “I had elk steaks inside. I think he was trying to get to that.”

Metal mesh covering the door and the cabin had kept him safe.

Still, the experience was a defining moment in the 15 days Clayborn spent at Granite Cabin in the Great Bear Wilderness.

That night would become inspiration for a print he created later. “Bear Sign” features a tree with a Flathead Forest sign announcing the Great Bear Wilderness boundary. The sign is marked by the claws of a grizzly bear.

His time in the wilderness led to many bear and bear sign sightings. Just 20 minutes after passing by the Great Bear Wilderness sign, his party saw a black bear.

Clayborn was packed into the Granite Cabin to spend 15 days alone researching and creating art work. He was there as part of the Artist-Wilderness-Connection, an artist residency program with the Flathead National Forest.

The Bob Marshal Wilderness Foundation is highlighting the artistry from the program during a fundraising event Friday, Nov. 5 at Glacier Discovery Square. Clayborn is the featured artist and will speak about his experience.

Clayborn is a Kalispell-based artist who spent the last 30 years as an illustrator and graphic designer. He is known for a series of art posters depicting Northwest Montana and Glacier National Park.

 When Clayborn headed into the wilderness in the later summer of 2009, his goal was to paint the water. He chose Granite Cabin specifically for this project.

The cabin is seven miles into the wilderness and sits perched on a 20 foot outcrop of rock above the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. His gear was packed in and out, allowing him to set up a studio inside the cabin.

Days were spent exploring the corridor and water. Evenings were for sketching.

He called the experience a modern-day “vision quest.”

“Everywhere I looked it was a painting waiting to happen,” he said.

Clayborn took reference photographs that he later turned into paintings. He started several paintings while at the cabin, but later finished them at his studio.

Rather than painting landscapes, Clayborn chose to focus in on smaller elements. Often his paintings show water moving over rocks or the golden light reflecting in the water in the instant before the sun slips below the horizon.

“Everywhere I saw ripples,” he said. “The clouds had ripples. The river had ripples. The rocks had ripples.”

Clayborn kept an illustrated journal during the experience. That journal along with select experiences is on display as “Fifteen Days at Granite Cabin” at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell.

While in the wilderness, Clayborn also composed songs. He was reading John Fraley’s “Wild River Pioneers,” which reconstructs the history of the Middle Fork area. The book and his experience inspired Clayborn to write “Ode to Slippery Bill Morrison” for early settler William H. Morrison.

The whole experience was one of great creativity.

“The connection with wilderness and nature, that is creative energy for me,” Clayborn said. “I live for that kind of thing.”

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation presents the “Voices of the Wilderness” exhibition and art auction Friday, Nov. 5 at Glacier Discovery Square. Tickets are $12. Doors open at 7 p.m. with drinks and dessert provided. All proceeds will support the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation’s efforts in trail maintenance, campsite restoration and noxious weed eradication in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.