Gennie DeWeese was a mother, wife, activist and mentor; but first and foremost, she was Gennie, and she was an artist.

The Bozeman based painter and printmaker died Monday after a battle with lung cancer and notice of her death spread quickly throughout the Montana art world.

Gennie is remembered by many as a woman who led a seamless existence, with no separation between her art and life.

For Helena artist Richard Notkin, Gennie was unpretentious and had a loving spirit.

"What was always impressive was her total commitment to art and most importantly, people ... artists of all kinds," says Notkin, who met Gennie when he was an instructor at Montana State University in 1981.

Gennie and her husband, artist Bob DeWeese, came to Montana when Bob was hired as an art instructor at MSU-Bozeman in the late 1940s.

"It's hard to think about Gennie without thinking of Bob," says Notkin. "They were an incredible team."

The DeWeeses raised their five children -- Josh, Tina, Cathie, Jan and Gretchen -- in Bozeman, and mentored many important Montana artists during that time to boot.

Phoebe Toland, a Helena painter, says she remembers "endless parties" at the DeWeese household and an incredibly welcoming, inclusive atmosphere.

Those were the years when Robert Pirsig came through Montana on the journey that became the inspiration for his book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

In the passage that includes his visit with the DeWeeses, Pirsig famously captured Bob -- the absent minded artist, stymied by a set of instructions for a barbecue rotisserie -- to a T.

In an interview a few months before her death, Gennie said Pirsig got everything right except her, especially when he wrote that she said "I'm so pleased."

"And I never said that," she said with a laugh.

Although Gennie is frequently mentioned in connection with her husband, those who loved and learned from her are quick to agree that she had a presence and an influence that were decidedly singular.

"Gennie was an extremely accomplished artist who was also forceful, passionate, fun, and generous," says Holter Museum of Art director Liz Gans, who calls Gennie "the matriarch of Montana's modern and contemporary art world."

Gennie is also frequently cited as an important mentor by many of Montana's most accomplished female artists -- among them Toland, MJ Williams, and Nan Parsons and Sara Mast -- not only for being a knockout painter, but for modeling how to forge a career as a woman, wife and mother.

Also on that list is artist Tina DeWeese, who says her mother continued to paint and maintain a studio even as she raised five children.

"She gave us the image of mother as individual," says Tina. "And she had a world of her own and a life of her own that was not all about her family."

Gennie often said she was an observer, not an innovator and that she simply painted what she saw. Like the artist herself, her subjects -- family cats and dogs, kids, the landscape -- may have been humble, but her eye was like no one else's.

Toland says it was in her later years that Gennie produced some of her most extraordinary work.

"She really had this amazing kind of blossoming," says Toland. "She didn't just settle on one way of expressing herself."

When it came to other Montana artists, Gennie was an unabashed fan. In her studio, she maintained a "women's wall" which featured painters like Toland and others, as well as one completely devoted to her son, Josh.

Toland says Gennie had a great sense of humor but was a woman of few words, who spoke mostly through her art when it came right down to it.

Gennie's paintings, says Toland, "just represented her and her wonderful life."

Reporter Emily Donahoe: 447-4083 or emily.donahoe@helenair.com