Seeing the light: Artist Rachel Warner

Artist Rachel Warner is a fifth-generation Montanan, and her work breathes with the life of this landscape in every stroke.

“I’m about as Montanan as you can get,” she said at her rural Columbia Falls home last week.

Warner says her career began with drawing and painting just like any child, but unlike her peers, she never gave up on it. She always wanted to be an artist.

Warner lives at her grandparents’ ranch. Her grandmother Jeannie ran a dress shop in Whitefish, and her grandfather Russell was a successful logger and rancher.

Her mother K.C. was a railroad engineer for 37 years. During her teens, Warner lived with K.C. in Havre, where she learned Native American culture and grew to appreciate it.

After high school, Warner studied art at Flathead Valley Community College under John Rawlings. For a small school, FVCC has a fantastic art program, she said.

“Wow, what a gift,” she said. “It’s an amazing art department.”

She also worked with Russell Chatham, considered one of the best contemporary painters in the West. He became friends with K.C. when she was an engineer in Livingston, where Chatham lives. Chatham worked with Warner and encouraged her work early in her career, at times sending her money and paint.

“He was my mentor,” she said.

In 2000, Warner completed her bachelor’s in fine arts from Montana State University-Billings, where she learned to “beat the streets and put a collection out to the public.”

“I thought (of artwork) in shows right out of college,” she said.

Her business started out great guns, and then the Great Recession hit and times were very lean for several years. Now the art market is rebounding, and Warner has works in several Western galleries, including the Dick Idol Gallery in Whitefish, Fercho Gallery and Elliott Design in Big Sky, and galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyo. and Santa Fe, N.M.

Most of Warner’s work, however, centers on museum shows and commissioned work. She’s looking forward to a show this spring at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell titled “Timeless Legacy: Women Artists of Glacier National Park.”

The Hockaday show will present works by contemporary artists like Warner, Carol Cooke, Linda Tippetts and Kathryn Statts, as well as late artists like Nellie Knopf, Lanford Monroe and Kathryn Leighton. The show will also include a video about the artists.

“I’m the local Glacier Park kid,” Warner said about the show.

Warner’s art embraces the warm glows and subtle colors at the end of the day. It’s called the “magic hour” by photographers and “tonalism” for painters, but she’s not in love with that term.

“It’s well-mixed harmonies,” she explained. “Not desaturated earth tones. The more proper phrase would be ‘colorist.’”

Warner has several works in progress in the large studio where she spends her days.

“I have a vision, an idea I’ve been chasing for quite a few years,” she said.

Her Native American work is authentic — you can almost smell the prairie and the horses.

“I want to honor the Native Americans,” she said. “The old ideals, the compassion and connection with the land.”

Warner also teaches at FVCC and says she still enjoys studying art, perhaps now more than ever. Working in a studio is solitary work, while teaching is a social endeavor.

“I love sharing,” she said. “It refines my ideas and challenges me to verbalize what I do.”

While she is successful, Warner says it’s important to keep growing and expanding her studies. Taped above a work in progress is a saying from artist Ryno Swart: “Train your fantasy.”

“It’s the motto I live by,” she said.