Spokane artist Ric Gendron lived a bold life of music, painting, family and spirituality

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

– Leonard Cohen

What rock song should one play to remember local painter Ric Gendron, who died this week at the age of 68? Something fierce? Meaningful? Beautiful?

Cohen was a favorite of Gendron’s, but so were Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Bob Dylan.

“I’m influenced by artists that actually have something to say, not just someone that’s gonna make a bunch of noise and hope to hit the top 40 kind of crap,” Gendron said in an interview from a Spokane care center last May.

Gendron himself didn’t become an artist for the fame or money. He became an artist because he had to.

In 1992, Gendron was 38, married and raising his own three young kids while working with high-risk youths for the Colville Tribe, of which he was a member. At a regular weekly staff meeting, with his signature sly smile and gruff demeanor, he dropped a bombshell that altered the trajectory of his life forever.

“We’re all just sitting in a circle, and everyone’s like, blah, blah, blah, giving their regular input, discussing what works and doesn’t work,” Gendron recalled. “And so it goes around to me, and everyone’s looking at me, and I’m just kind of sitting there.”

“And then I say, ‘I hate this job. I don’t want to do it anymore,’ ” Gendron said mildly. “And I got up and I walked out, and I never worked for anybody ever again in my life.”

Gendron left work for the last time that day 30 years ago to return to his house in Grand Coulee, the border town next to the Colville Confederated Tribes Reservation in northeastern Washington. He waited for his kids to come home from school to break the news to them.

“I told my kids, I say, ‘Dad just quit his job. I’m going to be an artist,’ ” Gendron said.

Gendron then moved two hours east, back to Spokane, the town where he had lived a short but pivotal four years during high school. His Spokane homecoming, twenty years after graduating from North Central High School, was a new chapter. He was ready to start a new life as a single parent and artist, a life devoid of regular paychecks, but crammed with paintbrushes and guitars, friends and family.

The studio became his new workplace. And in that space, he thrived. With his cherished seventies rock albums blaring, Gendron would paint nearly every single day. For several years, he worked out of an old wooden garage in Peaceful Valley along the banks of the Spokane River, an enormously important site for the Spokane Tribe where the Natives would meet with other area tribal members for life-sustaining annual salmon runs.

With the sacred waters roaring outside, Gendron’s mind roared inside. His style was fierce, fiery and unflinching. Wild colors, contemporary subjects, looming ferocity.

But life as a full-time artist in Spokane was not easy. Never has been, Gendron admitted.

“It was a struggle,” he said. “Still is a struggle.”

But there was a beauty in the struggle. And growth. And laughter. Always laughter.

Gendron, sitting on his hospital bed in May, seemed well even after ten long weeks cooped up. He looked handsome, with his long, salty hair and green moccasins. Small canvases he was in the process of painting lined the walls. His guitar never strayed far from his hand.

“Being a musician is an important influence, but so is being Indigenous, and so is being a father,” Gendron said.

Gendron spent the last two months of his life back with family at the home where he had lived for the past seven years in Elmer City, Washington, on the Colville Reservation, a short walk from the Columbia River. Leaving the hospital was a choice he made deliberately, after hearing he had six months to live.

“I ain’t no hero, but if that’s all the time I got, I’m not gonna spend it laying in bed staring at the ceiling waiting to die,” Gendron said. “I’ll be living my life.”

And he did. There were times in recent weeks when he poured himself coffee, cranked up his music and painted as much as he could. He hugged all the children and grandchildren. And he took the opportunity to see old friends, according to Marmot Art Space gallery curator Marshall Peterson.

“He got to say goodbye to everyone, which is more than most people get,” Peterson said. “He made his mark on this world, that’s for sure.”

Gendron’s body of work will live on, of course. His explosive depiction of a Native child having his braids cut off by a priest will forever be a highlight of his “Indian Boarding School Series” of paintings shown at Whitworth University in 2002. The release of the book “Rattlebone,” turned into a 2013 traveling exhibition, will continue to galvanize viewers with its spiritual and haunting brilliance of mind and color. Like surreal signposts from another world, Gendron’s layered murals will persist in sparking thought throughout the region and beyond. His musician murals in downtown Spokane will delight on the daily. His most recent book “KWILSTIN (Sweat Lodge),” curated by Peterson, is a visual journey into the heart of Gendron’s passion for the sacred rites of “the sweat.”

But the loss of his presence hits friends hard.

“I feel so lucky that I’ve gotten to know him, because I know so many people who have put him on this big pedestal, and think he’s so tough and mean and moody,” local painter Melissa Cole said shortly before Gendron died. “He’s really just a big softy inside, always teasing.”

Cole said he even teased her with his art sometimes, copying her style or adding in a cheeky cartoon when they were working on something together.

But above all, Gendron was one of a kind, she said.

“He took all of his experiences, his musical talents, spirituality of the sweat lodge, and his love for family and blended everything into his own style,” Cole said.

A wake for Gendron is at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Nespelem Longhouse in Nespelem. All are invited.

Like a bird on a wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free

– Leonard Cohen