Painter blends animals, surrealism, medieval imagery

Red Birds

When Jennifer French was in first grade, she drew a horse. And after looking at the similar drawings of the other kids, she realized her horse looked a lot more like a horse. From that moment forward, Jennifer knew exactly what she wanted to do. When people asked her as a child, she told them straight up, “I want to be an artist and a part-time waitress.”

So even then, French had a notion that being an artist might represent a conflict between the creative and the practical. French’s father worked for Conoco, and because of his job, they moved every three years or so. Continue Reading →

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Sailing on the good, but sinking, ship ‘Healthcare’

DC

Nothing summarizes the emptiness of Montana’s special election for the U.S. House better than the candidates’ stances on what may be the second-most important issue to come before Congress in the next two years: healthcare.

Those 30-second TV ads leave little time to flesh out plans for reforming healthcare. But the candidates’ websites, with virtually unlimited and cheap space, aren’t much better. Continue Reading →

The Top 10 (plus 6) Montana photo feeds on Instagram

You know when you start a project and you think it will be simple and straight-forward but then you dig into it a little and it turns out it is going to be way more complicated than you thought and if you had known that in the beginning you probably wouldn’t have taken it on in the first place?

That’s what happened to me last year when I proposed a “Top 10 Montana photographers to follow on Instagram” story to Last Best News. Continue Reading →

Prairie Lights: A 2nd opinion on that triple endorsement

Adam

Unsurprisingly, three Montana daily newspapers, all owned by Lee Enterprises, have come out in support of Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the special election to fill Montana’s vacant (and only) seat in the U.S. House.

You can read what the editorial boards of the Billings Gazette, the Missoulian and the Helena Independent-Record had to say, or you could just glance at one of them, because they all said essentially the same thing: that in these perilous times we need somebody who can get right to work, which they claim Gianforte is ready to do. Continue Reading →