New art gallery opens in downtown Columbia Falls

“One of the fondest memories I have from my childhood is the summer holidays in the south of Portugal on an island that is quite small. You have to go around pretty much walking, there are no roads or cars, it’s just the sand and the sea,” artist Lucia de Brito Franco said, surrounded by the vibrant and flowing layers of paint that make up her artwork, and now her art gallery. 

“That’s where my first inspiration started for my artwork.”

The Lucia de Brito Franco Art Gallery is a brand new Columbia Falls feature, located at 638 Nucleus Avenue, Suite 103. It contains not only de Brito Franco’s work — reminiscent of looking up through blue waters or thick canopies — but that of other local artists also inspired by the energy and beauty of nature.

De Brito Franco started free diving when she was around six years old, growing up in Lisbon. To battle the strong currents, she would cling to the ropes anchoring boats to the sea bottom and stay there as long as she could, watching the fish swim by. 

At 14, she was given the opportunity to take up oil painting as an after school extracurricular, with lessons from her first teacher, Artur Ramos. In a school with thousands of students, she was the only one to take him up on free lessons. She went on to study watercolors in England, oil painting and drawing at Ar.Co in Lisbon and Architecture at the University of Lisbon. For the past 20 years or so, she has settled on acrylic paints, though she uses them with a technique similar to oil. 

“It’s almost like an interior body, and then you have skin. Each painting has about 12 layers of paint, not that I count,” de Brito Franco said. 

De Brito Franco has displayed work through Portugal, the Azores and Switzerland. In 2018, during an exhibition in Portugal, she met Greg Fortin, the owner of Glacier Adventure Guides. 

Fortin invited de Brito Franco back to Montana for the summer, which was spent painting in Dayton, diving in Flathead Lake and hiking Wild Horse Island. Now the pair is married, and continues to seek adventure. 

“What I’m very happy about living in this area is that we are surrounded by these pristine regions, and Glacier is one of these protected areas,” de Brito Franco said. “You can feel a very strong presence of nature, but not just any nature, it is very vibrant, because it doesn’t have interference from people so much. It’s very strong to me, as an artist I can feel that.”

Her art now contains inspiration from the cool turquoise glacial runoff of Montana and its old growth forests. 

“My focus in my art is always to resonate with the miracle of life. When I’m painting, I’m flowing in a very intuitive way, it’s not rational,” de Brito Franco said of her style. Nature, she explained, works in a similar way. 

It is this energy that de Brito Franco said ties together her work and the work of others in her gallery. Currently on display alongside de Brito Franco’s abstract acrylics are Polson native Donna Schumacher Davis’s plein-air paintings of local landscapes, which she completes after biking her equipment to the locations, pulled on a tiny trailer. Rusty Wells’s watercolors are inspired by his previous work in the wilderness as a mountaineering instructor, hunting and fishing guide and the things he enjoys in those wild places. Rebecca Sobin works in art and science, creating topographical, layered paintings with oil and cold wax. 

“I think it’s important to take this opportunity to see these works here in town, because I don’t know when again we will have this collection of works together… Take the chance, come and visit!” de Brito Franco said. 

For now, the Lucia de Brito Franco Art Gallery will be a seasonal winter location. In the future, de Brito Franco hoped it could be open more full-time, possibly offer classes and host more artists. De Brito Franco is typically working there 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for people wanting to stop by, or by making an appointment by emailing luciadebritofranco@gmail.com.