Distinctly Montana Magazine

79 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m state, and in this way Steen's statues were scattered across the country. As a result of this transactional migration, it's a delight- ful impossibility to know where you may someday encounter a Tree Person in your travels. While driving through Roundup in 1970 on their way to parts East, young friends and artists James Todd and Richard Young encountered the Tree People and were intrigued enough to in- vestigate. Todd was an art student at the University of Montana who eventually became professor at his alma mater. Young was to go on to become the director of the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings (renamed later to the Yellowstone Art Museum). The two men asked Lee Steen, at this point in his seventies, about his in- fluences. Who were the artists who inspired him in his own work? Lee reportedly did not point to anyone in particular. He in- stead explained, "It was just something to do. It come to me that I could see a man just by looking up in a tree. I'd cut him down and trim him out so he had two legs and two arms, and put a face on him with crayon…some of them I just marked out to make a nose where he'd been sawed off on a slant. I think about it and then I go out and see if I can find what I see in my mind, looking up into the trees. The more you do, the more it comes to you." Fluffy clouds that look like fish, dogs, or bears. The man in the moon. The ability to perceive familiar images in unfamiliar places, or the human tendency to attribute hu- man qualities to inanimate objects, both stem in part from a phenomenon called pareidolia (from the Greek "para" for beside or instead of, and "eidolon" for image, form, BORN OF IMAGINATION, NECESSITY, PERSISTENCE, AND RESOURCEFULNESS—IN OTHER WORDS, ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF CREATIVITY—THIS VISIONARY ENVIRONMENT WOULD BECOME THE BROTHERS' LEGACY. LINDSAY TRAN

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