For clothing designer, Glacier National Park inspires

A Columbia Falls artist is making clothing from oil paintings of Glacier National Park’s landscapes and flowers.

Leah Katz sends large images of her paintings to a fabric company to print on to organic cotton, which she uses to sew skirts and scarves. Paradox Painting products are available locally at the Hockaday Museum of Art gift shop.

She started the clothing business just over a year ago with the idea to re-create Hawaiian shirts with Glacier Park flowers on them. She decided to make skirts because that’s what she loves to wear. The fabric is made from a painting of 49 species of the Park’s flowers.

“I paint the landscape because it is real,” she said. “The image I paint is representative of how the subject makes me feel.” She said that Glacier Park is a paradox because it makes her feel alive, yet at the same time it could kill her. She sees paradoxes throughout her life, inspiring her business name.

Katz has been painting in national parks since she graduated with an art major from Colorado College. She grew up in Massachusetts, but moved west for college in search of authenticity and sustainable living.

As a high school student, she had fallen in love with wild places while backpacking seven weeks through Lake Clark National Park in Alaska. So, she moved to the next best place, Montana, 13 years ago. She worked at the Park during the summer and the rest of the time worked on a master’s of arts degree from the University of Montana. Currently, Katz works in the Park’s backcountry permit office during the summer and Runner Up Sports in Whitefish in the winter.

Katz said the degree helped her develop as a painter, but not how to market her artwork or run a small business. So, she enrolled in the Montana Artrepreneur Program last year. It’s a workforce development program hosted by the Montana Arts Council to help artists gain business skills. Over 400 artists have already gone through the program.

Katz said that one of the ways the program helped her was by creating a support system with local artists who she previously hadn’t met. The course work took six months to complete. Now Katz is working toward MAP certification that will help with business relations within the state. She plans to have her website finished by the end of the summer at paradoxpainting.com and she also has an online Etsy shop.

While going through MAP, she distilled the purpose of Paradox Painting, which is to be environmentally friendly. She said the business raises awareness of human consumption with a product that doesn’t deplete the world’s resources but expresses Katz’s love of the Park and helps connect other people to its wild beauty.

However, sourcing local products has been a challenge. She had to order the organic cotton fabric from a company in North Carolina that sources the cotton nearby. Then, she discovered that there aren’t any local companies that produce Montana-sourced paper. All of the wood pulp comes from outside of the state. She compromised and used a company that prints locally but on recycled paper that comes from Japan.

She also found conflicting research about the sustainability of silk. So, for now, she has stopped making silk scarves.

Part of being environmentally friendly is durability, so she tested the clothing. She hiked about 93 miles in Mount Rainier National Park last year while wearing the skirt and continued to wear it almost every day for six months. And still wears it to this day. She said the first thing that will wear out is the elastic waistband, so she designed it to be easily removed and replaced.

Her identity is wrapped up in the landscape of the wild world and its connection to the modern world.

“When I wear my paintings I am expressing my identity,” Katz said.