I think it’s time to start telling you about my friend Ernie.

Ernie was a man that I had the solid, good fortune of spending about a year getting to know when I worked as one of his personal care attendants.  In a nutshell, Ernie was an artist, a Blackfeet Indian, a collector of jokes, and a patient and devoted teacher.  He was also quadrapalegic.  I’m not going to get into a lot of detail about him today–there’s just so much to say about him that we’ll just consider this the introduction of a very long tale.

For some basic background, Ernie was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in 1943.  Though he survived two tours of duty in Vietnam without incident, it was a car accident that caused the injury to his spinal cord that sentenced him to a lifetime in a wheelchair.  It was during his recovery in a VA hospital that Ernie met Bill, a man whose fate was much worse than Ernie’s.  Bill lived in an iron lung.  Ernie always said it was pretty tough to feel sorry for yourself when the guy next to you was only allowed out in “the real world” for an hour each day.

During this hour of freedom, Bill would paint.

And it was Bill who introduced Ernie to the world of art.  Ernie was fortunate to have lateral movement of his arms (he could move them side to side) which granted him a substantial amount of freedom despite his injury.  He also had one of the most positive and relaxed approaches to life that I’ve ever witnessed.  To skip ahead a few years, Ernie obtained both his Bachelors of Fine Arts and his Masters of Fine Arts from Montana State University.  His journey into art is the type of thing that legends are born from, and I can assure you that he deserves the honor of being called a Master.

Ernie always had a way of looking at the world from every angle–he had to.  In order to create his oil paintings, Ernie used an easel (specially designed for him by the MSU engineering department) that rotated 360 degrees.  This meant that not only could this quadrapalegic man paint, he could paint sideways and upside down.  And they weren’t small paintings–in his prime he was painting pieces that measured up to 10 feet by 8 feet.  When I saw them they were casually stacked against a wall in his humble low income apartment off of Grand Avenue.  When most people saw them they were hung with honor on the walls of prestigious galleries in North America, Europe, and Japan.

After some searching, I was able to find one of the paintings from his Red Man series:

This piece is called Buffalo Hunter and measures 47″x52″.  A lot of the inspiration for Ernie’s artwork came to him in dreams, a means of communication that I believe he still uses.  The subject matter of his work always let his sense of humor shine through, as you can see from the wooden horse between his legs.  As Ernie would say, “Because every cowboy needs a horse.”  Ernie died in January of 2005 after returning to his native Blackfeet home.

And that’s a short history of the life of Ernie Pepion.  I always promised him that we’d write a book about his life and I’d like to think of this as the beginning of that process.  So cheers, Ernie.  Have a Bud Light for me.

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