Forsyth artist always kept his customers satisfied

FORSYTH — How do you make a living as an artist in a place like Montana or North Dakota?

Just ask Bob Watts. He is an accomplished and prolific painter, but if he had tried to live solely on his paintings, he probably couldn’t have supported his wife and three children.

That’s why Watts was also an art teacher, author, playwright, musician, promoter, actor, sculptor, muralist, collector and woodworker. And when even those weren’t enough, he took to painting with a crowbar, a gimmick that gave his sales a welcome boost.

“If you’re going to paint for a profession,” he said, “you better paint what’s popular with others. So I get satisfaction in satisfying others.”

What he said of his art could be said of his life.

These days, at 76, long after he briefly toyed with the idea of retirement, Watts is transforming his hometown of Forsyth one wall at a time, creating a series of huge murals depicting scenes of life in Montana.

Watts was born in Forsyth and when he was 4 his family moved to a farm on the Kinsey Project near Miles City. He started drawing as a young boy. His parents, recognizing his passion and his skill, gave him a little box of oil paints and brushes for his 10th birthday.

That was March 18, 1948. The next day, he completed his first oil painting, titled “Pal,” which he still has.

“It was a picture of a dog,” he said. “Wouldn’t a boy paint a picture of a dog?”

Watts loved the farming life, and as the only boy among his parents’ four children, he was supposed to take over the farm. But he had bad hay fever that turned into asthma, and by the time he was in college the doctor told his parents that the boy’s farming days were over.

He attended Montana State University for a couple of years, studying art, then worked in a sawmill for three years while taking correspondence classes in art. He had a wife and two children by the time he moved back to Miles City, where he worked briefly as a John Deere salesman and then at the J.C. Penney store.

He liked working at the store — “I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t still hold the record for the most men’s suits sold in one week” — but he had never stopped painting, often on commission.

He was still at J.C. Penney when a woman who’d seen his paintings at the county fair asked him if he’d talk about his art and his techniques for her ladies guild. Watts said he was scared to death at the prospect of talking in front of a group, but the woman kept asking and he finally consented.

“Well, I did that, and them people were so receptive,” he said, a trace of wonder lingering in his voice. “I was having so much fun.”

They asked him to come back, this time to offer a class on oil painting. That quickly turned into a weekly class, and as word spread he began offering similar classes in nearby towns, including Terry, Broadus and Forsyth. It was fun but stressful, given that he was also working full time at J.C. Penney.

In 1965 he decided to pursue art full time. He quit his day job and opened a studio in Miles City. He continued his circuit-riding art instruction, eventually teaching 200 students a week in morning, afternoon and night classes.

He also expanded into North Dakota, to such an extent that he moved to Bowman, N.D., for a year and then to Dickinson. He bought some property seven miles south of town, an old German-Russian settlement that included a collection of rather crude but sturdy buildings.

His favorite was a rock barn, which he transformed into his studio and gallery. The gallery was open only in the summer, during the tourist season when his teaching load was relatively light. He sold some works, but it was difficult being south of Dickinson and the interstate.

“So I got an idea,” he said. “Again.”

His idea was to create a tourist attraction. He constructed a long, two-story steel building. In the center of it he built Rawhide City, an assemblage of 14 Old West stores and businesses crammed with antiques Watts had collected on his travels. He rigged up animated mannequins in the shops, complete with music and sound effects.

On the second story on either side of the building he built long galleries containing as many as 400 of his oil paintings.

That building was connected to the old rock barn, and in the hayloft of the barn he displayed a series of life-size murals showing scenes from the life of Christ, these also accompanied by narration, music and dramatic lighting.

He wasn’t done yet. He also built a 2,000-seat amphitheater and a stage where he produced variety shows, plays and concerts. He wrote three plays and lots of shorter pieces, and he also performed in a band. Watts plays the guitar, steel guitar and wooden spoons, joined by his daughter on piano and son on saxophone.

Rawhide City was booming, but then somebody in state government decided his advertising sign on the highway was illegal. Down it went and down went attendance, too. Nothing daunted, Watts had another idea.

He created a 62-foot-tall torso of a gorilla — “the brother of King Kong,” he said — out of steel, plastic sheeting, spray-on foam insulation and latex. It had nothing to do with Rawhide City, but it towered over the old barn and you could see it from the interstate. The roadside attraction was soon more popular than ever.

He never stopped teaching art classes and creating new paintings. He figures he’s had 7,000 students all told, and he claims that not a one of them left his tutelage unable to produce a decent oil painting. How many paintings has he produced himself?

“I’m gonna say it has to be 8,000,” he said. “I used to keep track.” However many he’s created, he remembered once putting up an art show at a mall in Minot, N.D., featuring 1,800 of his own works. 

It was a show in another mall, in Dickinson, during the Christmas season of 1975, that inspired him to take up the crowbar. He was in the center of the mall, cranking out new works and surrounded by his paintings.

But everybody was too busy shopping even to stop, much less buy anything. When he failed to sell a single painting in three days, he was feeling desperate, which he said is the best kind of inspiration.

He was staying with a friend, and when they drove to his house that night and the garage door opened, “here was all these tools up there. And that darned crowbar was hanging there. … I knew I had an idea and I knew I could make it work.”

He hardly slept that night, on fire with his new plans. He arrived at the mall plenty early so he could practice painting with a crowbar before the shoppers arrived. When they did, he was so wrapped up in his new technique that he was startled to hear a man shout out, “Do you sell those things?”

Watts turned around to find 60 or 70 shoppers, already loaded down with bags and packages, watching him paint with the crowbar.

“People waited in line to order paintings,” he said with a grin. “We had a good Christmas.”

He still uses the crowbar.

“It’s a novelty idea, you know? So I use them when I’m out at shows,” he said. “It’s a good attention-getter. I’ll tell you what, it’s the unusual that catches on.”

Meanwhile, Rawhide City had become so popular that Watts was induced by developers to relocate the whole thing, complete with the giant gorilla, to Mandan, N.D. This was in the late 1970s, after he’d been in Dickinson for seven or eight years. The new venture was successful at first, but after a series of setbacks — a bad investor and a big spike in gas prices among them — Watts was forced to sell. It took three solid days to auction everything off.

He would later open a studio in Bismarck, where he remained until 2000. That year he returned to Forsyth to take care of his father, who had retired years earlier from farming and was having health problems.

Watts was thinking of retiring himself, but that lasted about a month. He started painting on commission again and churning out the crowbar paintings. At one point, by popular demand, he began selling a crowbar with each painting. They thought he was crazy when he went into the hardware store in Forsyth and ordered 85 crowbars.

He’d painted some murals over the years, but nothing large in Forsyth until the owner of the Royal Oaks Inn, across the street from his studio, asked him to paint the wall on the alley side of his building, which houses railroad workers.

Watts spent the summer of 2006 creating “The Phantom,” a half-block-long mural showing an old steam-powered train rolling through a Montana prairie. His second mural became the largest artwork of his life. “Autumn on the Yellowstone,” painted on the side of the Yellowstone Pharmacy building, is 32 feet high and 100 feet long, a stunningly beautiful depiction of the Yellowstone River at Forsyth.

The elaborate A-frame ladder he built to work on the mural became as famous as the painting itself. When he was done, he cut up the wooden ladder, painted scenes on the lengths of wood and sold those, too.

“It paid for my materials,” he said.

Other murals followed. One of the finest is “Log Cabin in the Woods,” painted on the side of the Independent Press newspaper office. In what would become something of a trademark, Watts incorporated two windows on the building into the cabin itself, to give the mural a 3-D effect. Off to the side of the mural, Watts painted a meadowlark perched on a branch, trilling away.

The meadowlark was his father’s favorite bird, and he got to see his son’s painting three days before he died in 2009.

At Car Quest Auto Parts, Watts created an unusual indoor mural. This one is painted on Styrofoam, which Watts sculpted in layers so that it is both a painting and a diorama, with a real model train chugging along in the foreground. The Forsyth Fire Station bears four of his murals, one on each wall. His latest creation, just about finished, is a cowboy scene that stretches across the front of the Forsyth Watering Hole.

You’d think that would be plenty to keep a 76-year-old busy, but Watts is also transforming the old Anthony department store into his new studio, office, gallery and performance space. The large building is crammed with paintings, Styrofoam storefronts (yes, he’s thinking of another Rawhide City-style attraction), sculptures, hundreds of books, magazines, art journals and reference works, a big collection of country music LPs and eight-tracks and musical instruments.

In the course of a tour of the building, Watts mentions off-handedly that he also collects barbed wire, a hobby he inherited from his father.

“I’ve got one of the country’s largest collections of barbed wire,” he said, and he hopes to be able to display that, too.

And then he shows a visitor a copy of the textbook he published years ago, “New Dimensions in Oil Painting,” and a hand-painted cedar chest, one of many, that he built. He also had a photo of another little project, a Dodge van that he modified to look like a semi struck, complete with a faux load of timbers that opened up into a roomy compartment that he used to fill with art supplies when he was teaching classes on the road.

He’d like to do some more vehicle modifications, start offering regular music jams in his studio and paint some more downtown murals.

“Now you know why I’ve got to live to be 150,” he said.

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