Deep in the American West: meet Harry Koyama, a beet farmer with an artist's soul

One of the few Asian Americans in the Yellowstone Valley, artist Harry Koyama paints flamboyant canvases of wildlife, wild places, and people that make up Montana. Writer Carrie La Seur is awestruck

Gallery: Harry Koyama’s magnetic paintings

By Carrie La Seur for Public Streets by Public Books, part of the Guardian Books Network

Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of rural southern Montana. It has microbreweries, artists, a cowboy hat–fixing genius, solar-powered lofts, and huge summer street events, along with homeless people, addicts, and the occasional break-in or fatal stabbing in an alley. Saucer-size rodeo buckles, business suits, elaborate mustaches, and sleeve tattoos co-exist. Shop doors stand open on summer evenings, when the draw of Harry Koyama’s narrow gallery strengthens to an irresistible force. Harry himself is the lure, as much as his flamboyant canvases of wildlife, wild places, and the vivid people who populate southern Montana. His presence pulls in locals who normally wouldn’t think of buying original art.

“You end up doing a lot of explaining,” Harry says, hands on knees on a straight-backed chair in the small studio behind his shopfront, having given a visitor the comfortable sofa that dominates the space. “Most people have some kind of enjoyment of art whether they know it or not.” In his 60s now, Harry came to painting late, after 35 years farming east of Billings. His hands are smooth but still bear the signs of rough work. He is slight and brown, with thinning hair and a face that falls into smiling lines even when he isn’t smiling.

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