‘A tremendous blessing’

After 30 years, Ward Tollbom announces retirement from Hen’s Tooth Studio in downtown Sandpoint

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Every small town has its characters that make it more than just a collection of buildings and street signs. It’s these individuals who make a town unique — who imbue it with color and light, who make it the special place it is.

For Sandpoint, Ward Tollbom is one of those characters.

The proprietor of Hen’s Tooth Studio on First Avenue for the past 30 years announced he was hanging up his watercolor brushes and closing the studio at the end of the year.

“I’m 75 years old,” he told the Reader. “My body doesn’t want to do the six-day-week thing anymore.”

Tollbom’s Hen’s Tooth Studio has been both a showcase for his meticulous, lifelike paintings of birds and a framing shop, which he said helped him continue creating the pieces he loves to paint.

His introduction to art was a Christmas present of oil paints he received when he was 17 years old — and that he initially scoffed at. 

“They sat in a closet and I ignored them,” Tollbom said. “After I went to U of I, I was bored to death on weekends. No mountains, no lake, no transportation. My friend and I decided we needed to get back home so we started hitchhiking back to Sandpoint and got a ride late in the day from some kids from WSU taking a loop through Idaho to buy beer on the way back to Spokane. They stopped at every roadside stop, picked up six-packs, threw bottles out the windows … and finally dropped us in Coeur d’Alene where we got a ride from a traveling salesman into Sandpoint.” 

Tollbom arrived in Sandpoint after midnight and, after a short sleep, got up in the morning just in time to hitchhike all the way back to Moscow.

“I said, ‘I gotta find something to kill my time over the weekends,’ so I took those paints to college,” he said.

Tollbom’s first creation impressed his friends, who said he should take an art class. He then studied watercolor painting from Alf Dunn, a professor who Tollbom said could do a demonstration painting in an hour that would impress the fiercest critic.

“He never did approve of the way I painted because I spent too much time on things,” Tollbom said. “With my personality, I wanted to nitpick and get all the details right. You know, I finally went down and found him in Moscow when he was 91 years old and visited with him. I finally got his approval.”

Anyone who has visited Tollbom’s studio has seen the dichotomy between his intricate paintings, produced with flawless watercolor strokes, versus the chaotic mess of a busy framing studio.

“I’m kind of a messy person,” he said, looking around at the collection of framing tools, matte boards and endless tools piled haphazardly around tables where he finishes the pieces that adorn the walls. “Someone once said, ‘Art breeds filth,’ and you look at my shop in here, it’s kind of true. It’s a mess in here. The paintings are meticulous because that’s what’s hanging on someone’s wall. … It takes me three days to clean this place up and a half day to get it right back to where it was. Seems counterproductive.”

Along with framed artwork of various birds and knickknacks, a curious item also hangs high on the exposed brick wall: a prosthetic leg. 

“That was my dad’s prosthetic leg,” Tollbom said, looking up at it with a smile. “He wore it from his 20s until he was almost 90. When he died, we had this leg. What do you do with it? Cremate it? I said, I’m going to hang this up on my wall and if I’m having a bad day, I’ll look up at it and think, ‘It could be worse.’”

In fact, Tollbom sold his first painting at his dad’s place of work.

“He was a meat cutter and I worked for him at the Economy Grocery and Stewart’s Market on Second and Pine,” Tollbom said. “When it sold, I thought, ‘Wow, I have enough money to pay for my materials.’ I was never smart. I was never athletic. I was never handsome. I didn’t have money and when I painted something that someone said was good and actually wanted to buy it, that was something I wanted to repeat.”

Thirty years and more than a thousand sold paintings later, Tollbom looks back at his time on First Avenue in the studio with gratitude.

“It’s been a tremendous blessing,” he said. “Where else can you go out fishing after work at night, bring home dinner, go on the back of Baldy and get a moose or elk or find huckleberries? I can do all these things and still sleep in my own bed at night. The lake is just unbelievable. You can be by yourself pretty quick out there and it’s a feast for the eyes every time you go out there.”

Along with the countless cherished customers over the years — which include notable names like Viggo Mortensen, Ben Stein and Per-Ingvar Brånemark (a Swedish doctor who developed the surgical technique to replace a missing jaw bone) — Tollbom also wanted to thank his landlord at the studio.

“One of the things that’s made it possible is that I’ve had an incredible landlord, Charlie Parrish, who has been beyond awesome,” he said.

Born just two blocks from his First Avenue shop, Tollbom said he has no regrets choosing to spend his time in North Idaho, close to nature, where he truly feels at home.

“Financially, it’s always a struggle if you want to stay in a small town [as an artist] and not go somewhere to seek your fortune,” he said. “You make sacrifices to be able to do what you love doing and live where you love living. It’s like Sandy Compton once said: ‘Sometimes you have to learn to live on air.’ I get around that knowing how to hunt and fish and pick huckleberries. … I like being outdoors and that’s my home. That’s what I’m familiar with. I’ve held those birds in my hand. I’m more familiar with them than anything else.”

A celebration of Ward Tollbom’s career will take place Saturday, Dec. 27 at 3 p.m. in the Hen’s Tooth Studio (323 N. First Ave.), with a special cake built by Abby Stolfo, proprietor of The Cakery on First, which will move into the First Avenue location after the first of the year.