Montana's Remote Glaciers Through the Drawings of Jonathan Marquis
By Chadd Scott on
Jonathan Marquis fell in love with Montana before even moving there in 2003 to finish college. It didn’t take long – backpacking and mountain climbing around the state – to know it was true love.
“When I climbed one of my first peaks and had this incredible 100-mile view, something really clicked and I knew that this is the place I'm staying,” Marquis said.
He was mostly an abstract painter then. He’d occasionally be inspired to sketch from his hikes, but initially rejected the landscape genre.
“It took me many years to figure out how to be a landscape artist. I don't like going into a place and assuming I have the agency to make art about it,” Marquis said. “It took me a little while of just living there, calling it my home, working, being part of the community there. I tried to avoid landscape (painting) because I felt like the mainstream art in Missoula at the time was pretty boring landscapes.”
What can I do differently here in Montana he wondered.
With his plein air sketches in the mountains becoming a more regular practice, drawing as a way of keeping his skills and senses sharp, the answer to what he could do differently in Montana came into focus following an opportunity to meet author, naturalist and Montanan Doug Peacock in 2013. Marquis asked Peacock what young artists could do to help the work of conservation and climate change.
“Go bear witness in your own backyard,” Marquis remembers as Peacock’s response. “I started thinking, ‘What's in my backyard here in Montana that I could go bear witness to and make an art project out of it?’ That led me back to news about melting glaciers in the state. What's going on with them? What's going on with the ones outside of Glacier (National) Park that (the media are) not talking about. That level of curiosity – wondering what's the situation on the ground – led me to conceive of the project.”

Jonathan Marquis. Courtesy Richard Forbes
The “project” is the “Glacier Drawing Project,” the artist’s long-term endeavor to draw all of Montana's glaciers before a warming climate melts the ice beyond recognition. Each year, Marquis visits new glaciers, revisits others, and often draws from mountain summits granting glimpses into some of Earth's most iconic and intact wildland geographies.
The “Glacier Drawing Project” is the only on-site, hand-drawn visual record of the 59 named glacial features in Montana's Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems. The Missoula Art Museum presents drawings from the series during the exhibition “Something to Hold: The Glacier Project,” through December 7, 2024.
Typically making one to five drawings on site in different scales, different compositions and viewpoints – at elevation, often in the freezing cold and howling wind – Marquis then uses those drawings along with photographs to produce his finished color pencil artworks which can take anywhere from 10 to 40 hours to complete. The drawings explore a personal connection with glaciers through color, mark-making, and careful attentiveness.
“I've built some nice, what I consider friendships with these glaciers, and it is sad to see them changing and losing ice,” Marquis said.
He does not consider the project a despairing one, however.
“There's something about the value of these landscapes that transcends whether or not these glaciers are considered active glaciers or if they're just snow fields. There's a lot to still rejoice in,” Marquis said. “These ecological systems are bigger than me, bigger than us. They've existed for tens of thousands of years. Change is part of their nature and so I remain hopeful that there will always be ice in Montana. To what extent is another question.”

Jonathan Marquis, 'Red Eagle,' from the Glacier Drawing Project. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist, Not Scientist
Starting in the early 2000s and continuing through to today, human caused climate change, and its effects has garnered greater and greater attention in the news media and from politicians. Stunning “then and now” photographs of Glacier National Park’s melting glaciers had the subject at the forefront when Marquis met Peacock in 2013.
“At that time, (Montana was) considered the canary in the coal mine because our glaciers are pretty low (elevation),” Marquis said. “If things like this are happening in Montana, then it’s going to be happening further north. Not too much longer after that, the ‘Chasing Ice’ movie came out which I saw the debut of at the local film festival.”
“Chasing Ice” is a documentary revealing the undeniable scientific reality of human caused climate change through observation of the Arctic’s rapidly disappearing ice.
“It's such a big issue that there were so many glaciers in Montana (and) there was no data, nobody was monitoring them that I could find, there certainly weren't any artists at the time working on it,” Marquis remembers. “Here's a contribution I can make to draw the glaciers.”
Marquis is quick to point out that he remains an artist, not a scientist. He views his role in the climate crisis as recording, personalizing, not educating.
“I've never been interested in trying to prove climate change because from my perspective, science and photographers have already done that many years ago,” he said. “It's not my job to try and convince people that climate change is happening, but more to get people to think about building an empathetic relationship with place, the place they live, and recognizing changes are going to happen. If we can live in more collaboration with the landscape, rather than seeing it as this empty object out there that has no meaning to my daily life, then maybe we can actually get some headway on (climate change) and live in a more reciprocal relationship with the landscape, and in that sense, hopefully address issues like climate change in the long term.”
It's an uphill battle, particularly in Montana, where fossil fuel interests – the industry driving climate change – remain powerful in the state’s politics and economy, not to mention the equally powerful cattle and mining forces there with their extractive, exploitative view of place.

Jonathan Marquis, 'Fissure,' from the Glacier Drawing Project. Courtesy of the artist.
Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines and the state’s two members of the House of Representatives, Republican’s Ryan Zinke and Matt Rosendale Sr., remain climate deniers despite scientists being settled on the subject. Zinke was a particularly notorious figure from the Trump Administration during his scandal-plagued time as a Secretary of the Interior waging war on nature.
“Jackson Glacier in Glacier (National) Park, when I first went there, the glacier was further down the mountain, now it's a little higher up, not by crazy amounts, but enough to where you can compare pictures and (see) it’s definitely receded a number of yards – 40 yards at least – but that’s hard )to determine) without actually going out there and really measuring,” Marquis said. “One reason why there isn't a ton of good glacial science in some of these remote glaciers (is because) to do the science correctly is challenging. Most scientists rely on satellite imagery and trying to monitor and report the changes that way, and that's certainly a very helpful technology, but it also doesn't put you on the ground and creates a sort of eye in the sky relationship with the land where we think of glaciers as mere geologic features or a data set, instead of an acting, living, organism connected to the health of the entire ecosystem that all kinds of animals depend on, as well as humans and local economies.”
People depend on artists as well. To bear witness. To take us into the mountains. To show us the melting glaciers.
Admission to “Something to Hold” and the Missoula Art Museum is always free.