Montana painter visits Havre

Missoula-based painter Laura Blaker visited Havre Tuesday on her trek to paint every main street in Montana.

This was her first time in Havre, Blaker said, adding that she couldn’t wait to visit Havre Beneath the Streets.

Blaker, who studied drawing at the Florence Academy of Art, has been traveling across the state for the last year and a half, taking pictures of main streets and then returning to her home in Missoula to paint them.

It has been a long and expensive process, Blaker said, adding that along with traveling and painting, she has been helping her daughter get ready to move to Paris to study fashion design, but she wants to keep going because she is really enjoying seeing all the towns in Montana.

Some of the towns she goes to, she added, were requests from people.

“Boulder was a request,” Blaker said.

The idea came to her two years ago while she was traveling down to Virginia City, Nevada, to teach painting, she said.

She was passing through some small towns, including Silver Star and Twin Bridges, Blaker said, adding “they were just like miniature towns. … Some were just a block long.”

“I thought, ‘That would be really cool to paint,’” she said.

She was hesitant to start, though, because she thought it would be expensive and she wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in it, Blaker added.

Her desire to paint the main streets won out, though, she said.

“I just decided to do it. … I just started it,” Blaker said, adding that the first pictures she painted were of Darby, Hamilton and Missoula.

She was surprised, she said, when she put some of her work on social media and people showed interested.

“People loved it. … They wanted to buy it,” Blaker said.

Blaker has also had some showings of her work, in Missoula and Stevensville, she said, because people had approached her.

She said she just finished her painting of Libby and plans to do a show there, after being asked to by a woman at its Heritage Museum.

Some of the small towns in the state have struggled, Blaker said, adding that Libby, for example, had trouble in the past with asbestos, and these paintings have seemed to have a good influence on the morale of smaller towns.

“The woman (from the Heritage Museum) said (the show) ‘is going to be so good for our town,’” she said.

The small Montana towns she has visited have been wonderful, Blaker said.

“Each town has something,” she said, adding that a local Belt man who let her stay at his ranch said to her, “Everybody helps each other — this is a small town.”

Blaker’s journey can be followed and her paintings viewed at her official website at https://www.mainstreetmontanaart.com/.