Tough Montana Rancher Lived Double Life

Her eyes were piercing and her hands were weathered from standing in the freezing cold to paint or feed cattle.

What the late Montana artist Isabelle Johnson saw with those intense eyes were not the lush green fields of the Midwest. Rather, Johnson saw the harshness of Montana winters and the rugged landscape near her family’s ranch outside Absarokee. So that’s what she painted in colors that fit the natural palette of the Northern Plains.

Former director of the Yellowstone Art Museum Donna Forbes remembers Johnson as a good friend and mentor. Johnson was a strong woman who was a gifted teacher and role model.

“Her great statement was, ‘You have to learn to look and see, not just look,’” Forbes said. “The depth of your seeing has to grow and hers did constantly.”

The Yellowstone Art Museum holds 827 Johnson-related works in its permanent collection, most of which were

donated to the museum by Johnson. One painting, “Pilot and Index Peaks, Wyoming,” was donated to the YAM in 1995 by Carol L. Cooper Ferguson, David L. Cooper and Joanne L. Morrill in memory of their parents, Lyle and Connie Cooper. The 1952 oil painting on canvas is on display in the “Boundless Visions” exhibit in the Scott Gallery.

The YAM is hosting a solo exhibit of Johnson’s works in November and December of 2015. The oil and watercolor paintings were completed by Johnson between the 1940s up until just a few years before her death in 1992 at the age of 91.

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