Former Hardin beet farmer, Harry Koyama, has built a strong reputation for his bold, impressionistic paintings of bears and bison.

Montana artist Harry Koyama is a quiet, humble man with a sharp intellect and self-effacing humor. When it comes to his artwork, though, his large paintings are boldly expressive and demand attention.

In a recent talk at the Billings Public Library, Koyama discussed his technique as he painted Brutus, the grizzly bear. Using only a palette knife -- never a brush -- he smeared on oil paint, often straight from the tube. At home in his studio, he often uses a caulking gun to dispense paint for his large canvases because it’s faster. A capacity crowd in the library’s community room peppered

A capacity crowd in the library’s community room peppered Koyama with questions about his inspiration, his choice of subjects to paint, and his transition from beet farmer to artist.

Koyama grew up in Hardin and spent most of his life working on the sugar beet farm his grandfather established in the early 1900s in Dunmore. Early in life, though, Koyama started drawing. One little girl in the audience asked him what he drew as a kid. The answer -- “football players. My brother and I loved football.”

Koyama said he also sketched the “run-of-the-mill stuff -- horses and cows.”

Now, he almost exclusively paints bison, grizzly bears, and sometimes Native Americans in regalia.

“The person I paint the most is Tommy Christian. I met him at Crow Fair. One year I had him in his regalia at ArtWalk and he danced.”

Christian is a member of the Sioux tribe and lives near Fort Peck, but he occasionally comes to Billings to visit Koyama.

For four or five years, Koyama operated a studio and gallery on Hardin’s Main Street in the Hotel Becker. He moved his studio and gallery to 2509 Montana Ave. in Billings in 2008, but still keeps a home in Hardin. His wife Sherry is a retired school counselor from the Hardin School District. Koyama’s work is also sold in Santa Fe, N.M., Jackson, Wyo., and Red Lodge.

Koyama started painting exclusively with a palette knife in order to keep his work loose in the impressionistic style. He discovered that when he painted with brushes, he got too exacting and tight.

Koyama said he left farming in 2003 after dealing with prostate cancer.

“I left my brother and his son to carry on and I started painting. I knew I had some talent, but it takes more than that,” Koyama said. Later he added, “I’m a better artist than I was a farmer.”

For his demonstration, Koyama captured the powerful head and body of a large male grizzly using a warm, reddish brown with bright yellow and white highlights and a striking red and black background in an abstract style that Koyama prefers for his backgrounds. Koyama makes it all look so simple, dabbing paint here and there to show the powerful haunches and the identifying hump of the grizzly. His paintings have increased in value from undere $1,000 when he started his art career in 2003 to $4,000.

”I have always liked the bear. It’s a Montana, Rocky Mountain animal. I’ve kind of become known as the bear guy.“

As a Japanese American, Koyama’s story also includes the challenges of racial discrimination. Soon after his parents were married, they were taken to an internment camp in Arizona during World War II. They were able to leave early to return to Hardin to work in the sugar beet fields to support the war effort, and there they raised their eight children.

Years later, Koyama studied art under Ben Steele at Montana State University Billings when it was Eastern Montana College. Steele had been a POW in Japan and survived the Bataan Death March. Unbeknownst to Koyama at the time, Steele was fighting against his hard memories of his Japanese captors as he quietly taught Koyama. The two eventually became friends and shared many hours together discussing art. Steele’s story, and his relationship with Koyama as his student, is depicted in the book, “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Aftermath,” by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman.

Even though Steele, who died in 2016 at the age of 98, and Koyama had such different styles of painting, the two are Montanans through and through with their shared love of wild places and wild beings.

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