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• • Western Art Week features two newly-minted Montana artists
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  • Western Art Week features two newly-minted Montana artists

Western Art Week in Great Falls is a boon for art lovers, but it's also an opportunity for some newly-minted Montanans to showcase their unique artwork.

Two of the artists displaying their work this week are Gary Lynn Roberts and Sunti Pichetchaiyakul.

Roberts is a Texan artist who fell in love with Big Sky Country. He said that has always been a fan of western art, and he learned from the best early on.

Roberts explained, "My father was a famous artist and he painted the western, and I was in his studio when I was a child with G. Harvey and Dale Art Winbert and A.D. Greer and a lot of these really famous artists and I just loved it."

And although he's new to the Treasure State, he and his family of six feel right at home in Hamilton. Roberts said, "The mountains, the rivers, just everything about it. I love my native Texas, I will always be a Texan but the lure of the mountains...I couldn't help it. I had to get up here."

Also in Great Falls to display his unique art is Sunti Pichetchaiyakul, who moved to Montana from Thailand. He said that he loves to see people's faces when they first experience his life-like monk sculpture.

He jokes that his name is even hard for native Thailand people to say, but maybe even more difficult is creating fiberglass masterpieces.

It took him five months to finish the monk on display at this year's Western Art Week event, and it's even more life like than it appears: Sunti used real hair from the monk's head to complete the piece.

Sunti first fell in love with art at the age of four, he says, when he started noticing the tiny details in life; he noted, "I think everything is so beautiful. I want to make. I want to copy." And 34 years later he's still at it.

He moved to Montana just two years ago from Thailand with his American wife. He works with wax sculptures and bronze as well, capturing every detail.

His next feat are wax sculptures of Lewis and Clark, and after that, he says he will create a sculpture of Sacagawea holding a child, and as a tribute to his 16-month old baby, he will use his daughter's face as a model for the baby.