The art of 'Faded Dreams & Empty Chairs'

• Leith DeWeese will be part of the Wild Bunch Show at the Hampton Inn during Western Art Week March 19-21.
• Her work also is on display at Wheatgrass Arts & Gallery in Glasgow.

ST. MARIE – Great art starts with getting out of the car — and sometimes that's the hardest part.

As she explores the back roads of northeastern Montana, artist Leith DeWeese looks for homesteads and other old, interesting buildings.

"You'll be driving by an old building, and you have to take the time to stop. Whenever you stop, there will be something," she said. "Getting yourself to stop is the hard part."

Between Plentywood and Scobey in the tiny town of Redstone, DeWeese stopped her car to look again at a building she'd already used in a painting. She'd studied the exterior, but this time she peeked in the window.

"I don't like to go in, but the windows were open. There was a striped overstuffed chair with all this board lath behind it for a wonderful linear quality," she said. "I got to painting, and I thought, 'faded dreams and empty chairs.'"

That became the title of a series of watercolors of chairs in rural ruins.

"You go to a lot of places, and it seems like there's always a chair they've left," she said.

DeWeese lives and paints in St. Marie, a former Cold War-era Air Force base north of Glasgow. Some of the homes are renovated but most are unoccupied, creating a riveting scene of military uniformity overcome by variable patterns of decay, some of which she captures in her paintings.

"I have people who come here and say it looks like the 'Walking Dead,'" she said. "I like the isolation and the peace. You can paint and you just work. There's a serenity in going into my studio here and just creating."

DeWeese lived in southern Utah and learned about St. Marie in the Navy Times.

"We bought a place for a getaway in the summer. We came every summer with the kids, and they would run free. Eventually we decided to move here," she said.

After 20 years teaching art and math in Opheim, DeWeese retired about three years ago. She's focused on watercolors for the last five years.

"I like the speed of watercolors. You sit down and do a big picture in a short time," she said. "I like the way they move. Watercolor is a blank paper and water with pigment. To get that kind of result from a minimal amount of material is amazing to me."

Watercolors are easy to ruin, though, and one must think backward, saving white spaces. She thinks of it like decorating an Easter egg, with layers of wax preserving a design. The medium beautifully captures the "faded" of faded dreams.

"You can get great boards with watercolor," DeWeese said. "Another layer, another layer and soon it looks so weathered. It's amazing."

She starts with photos, may of which she turns into greeting cards.

DeWeese does commissions, too. Some people send photos, but her preference is to visit the place she's painting. She takes 50-100 pictures and invites the buyer to choose among 10 or so scenes.

"It's always fun doing that, and there's always several things you end up painting besides your subject," she said. "There's always treasures there they don't see but you see because you're the artist."

Even if she never discovers the story behind the places she paints, DeWeese likes to imagine what became of the people after they left the place where they lived.

"You wonder. The thing I mostly wonder is, did they make it? Did they get their dreams? Did it work?" she said.

A building left to rot instead of being recycled or destroyed often has a family connection to the current landowner, so "you see that they did make it," she said.

"I like old buildings," she said. "They talk to me."

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at 791-1490 or by email at kinbody@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter at @GFTrib_KInbody.