Famous and Not Forgotten: Artist-Sheepherder Bill Stockton
- Montana Press
- May 17
- 4 min read
Bill Stockton used to say regularly, “People think I am crazy.” A sign painter and commercial artist-illustrator who developed creative standards that would be “beyond the pulling taste,” Stockton always stayed true to his greatest and some considered his craziest personal loves: ranching and abstract art.
The son of Fergus County homesteaders, Bill was born in 1921 and raised in Winnett and Grass Range; the Grass Range High School graduate left Central Montana to join the armed forces and later become a commercial artist, studying at the Minneapolis School of Art, and then at the Ecole de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris.
At a time when he was reaping the fulfillment of a viable career, he said that he had “a change of heart,” and he and his wife (whom he met in France) removed to a ranch a few miles west of Grass Range. In the midst of the wrinkled hills of the Grass Range country, Stockton built “a modern home,” a structure that was “itself a work of modern art, according to one account.
He spent most of his summer months ranching to support himself and his family of four while the winter was reserved for his other profession as an artist. “That’s why you see so much white in my paintings,” he told a newspaper in July 1958.
From the stony, edgy silence of the plains, he dedicated himself to the avant-garde movement of painting, an abstract expressionism born out of eminent Pablo Picasso’s Cubism.
He restricted his skill to a tiny space, a small room so filled to capacity with paints, easels, drawings and sketches that it was once written that no two persons could comfortably coexist in the studio at the same time. Stockton once said that his goal as an artist was “to organize nature” and transcribe it into “the abstract, into pure geometrical form.”
Deviating from Picasso’s Cubism, which was enamored of the creation and use of a third-dimension illusion, Stockton ignored that dimension and transferred its multifaceted designs into only two dimensions. A typical Montana scene of Stockton’s sacrificed details and nuances for an emphasis on the typical marks of this isolated country.
He had “no heart or desire,” said Stockton, to produce the conventionally familiar type of painting that the average viewer would understand; he called such paintings “potboilers," though he sometimes grudgingly produced them to generate sales. His passion, however, wasn’t in the familiar, or in the generation of art that most people instinctively would call pretty and clamor to hang in their living rooms. Such paintings would’ve been too exacting, too imitative.
If the viewer wanted the precise copying of nature, believed Stockton, they would be better off purchasing a cheap copy of a photograph. Indeed, Stockton excelled in the abstract blending of supreme colors and harmonious forms.
“Most people think of an artist as a craftsman who can imitate something to their taste…
But this is not the purpose of an artist…an artist takes the ordinary and makes something interesting out of it…He can’t cling to the subject. Nature is disorganized order…It is the task of the painter to organize it just like the musician organizes noise to compose a melody and the writer organizes disorganized life to create literature.”
What looked insignificant to the average viewer could fascinate Bill Stockton. It could be a painting of a rock formation or other subjects that he could find anywhere without seeking. Perhaps it could be a pattern of boulder slabs or a curious triangle of trees that thrilled him.
One of Stockton’s more popular paintings, “Bus Stop,” however, didn’t necessarily represent his abstract school of painting. Stockton claimed that he didn’t know the name of the subject – a stranger. He said that he had seen her in “a small bus stop restaurant” and that concise impression had inspired him to paint the features as he remembered them.
He told one art publication in 1958 that he hoped for recognition beyond “the relatively small groups of experts” who admired his art. But he believed that his chances were slight.
“A recent poll in New York revealed that of 100 fine artists, only seven or eight were able to make a living with their work,” Stockton said. “Fifty of the artists had a monthly income of
less than $200.”
Stockton believed enough in the power of art that he taught it both in colleges and privately.
“Both his philosophy and his livelihood are those of a man of the soil,” John Armstrong, Director of the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings, said in 1973. “His art has a moral honesty that seems difficult to find in much art today.”
Stockton’s quirky juggling of occupations and unique skill set reinforced the view that he was a man of distinction. Medium-hopping at his leisure, his art spanned a range from abstract-expressionist paintings and metal sculptures to light fixtures and furniture.
There was no shortage of acknowledgment among artists and art lovers for Stockton’s work. Many ranchers felt a responsive nerve when they viewed Stockton’s sheep renditions; one exhibit of his sheep paintings was described by an art guide “as explicit and down-to-earth
as the woolgrower-artist who created them.”
Stockton’s paintings were accepted for entry in various national exhibitions and his work was represented, according to one estimate, in about 200 private collections in New York, Tulsa, Billings, Bozeman, San Francisco and even in France.
One Montana newspaper editor heralded Stockton as “perhaps the finest artist Montana has produced since Charlie Russell,” and portrayed the shrewd individualist as equally committed to sheep ranching, which Stockton proudly pointed out on one occasion, produced food and clothing for people.
“I really have more respect for a good sheepherder than an artist,” said Stockton in 1973.
“The sheepherder functions in society. I produce food and clothing for 90 people here.”
He died at his Grass Range home in 2002.
—Review Staff
