An art gallery in Sandpoint that is still going after 25 years may be as scarce as hen’s teeth, but Ward Tollbom at Hen’s Tooth Studio is still painting finely detailed pictures of wildlife — after all these years.

Tollbom named his studio Hen’s Tooth because an old-timer he knew referred to anything that was difficult to get his hands on as being “scarcer than hen’s teeth.” Reason being, hens, like all wild birds, don’t have teeth. At the time, Tollbom’s paintings were being sold before he even painted them, so he never had inventory to show visitors to his gallery. Hence, the Hen’s Tooth Studio, also named for his penchant for painting birds.

His most recent painting is rather comical. It’s a prehistoric bird “just discovered in my brain.” He has named it “Pterosaurus Hoenicus” meaning “tusked pterosaur.” The painting is actually a gift to his son-in-law, Josh Hoehn, who has a running joke with Ward. When his father-in-law shows him a painting he has done, Hoehn says, “Well, it’s good, but it’s no Bob Ross.”

Bob Ross, who died in 1995, was the antithesis of Tollbom. Ross would, on his television show, paint a landscape picture filled with happy trees and pretty clouds you might see in a dive bar or in a cheap hotel lobby, in 26 minutes. Some of Tollbom’s paintings have taken months to paint. For Christmas, Tollbom bought Josh a Bob Ross calendar and he is giving Hoehn the painting for which he is named.

Next summer, when the wrinkleless “from having no vices” Tollbom, turns 70, he hopes to have a 70/50 art show, a retrospective of his work starting 50 years ago when he sold his first painting.

Tollbom has a large stack of his watercolor efforts from college from which he will cull for the exhibit. Many of these are more traditionally what one thinks of when they think of watercolor than his later work. Presently, he has no idea where this exhibit will occur; his shop is too small.

Tollbom’s paintings are priced anywhere from $500 to $7,000. “No one has to have what I do. It’s a total luxury to own art,” said the self-effacing Tollbom.

His work table is covered in framing materials and works of art. On the wall above the table is an impressive collection of hundreds of framed arrowheads he and his brother found starting in the 1970s, all within 15 miles of Sandpoint. Next to these a mule deer looks down as Tollbom demonstrated how he can use one brush to create many different outcomes depending upon the amount of water he uses, the paper he uses, and how he uses the brush; he sometimes starts off with rock salt for the background.

Tollbom surprises the uninitiated by his revelation that his meticulous, painstaking, careful paintings are created with watercolors. At this point in his art career, he doesn’t mess up. “I can’t. Days, weeks, or even months are invested into one painting. I’d have to go somewhere until I recovered if that happened,” he said.

In the window of his studio is a hand-drawn rooster, the start he used for one of his all-time favorite paintings — a red junglefowl rooster. The completed version may be viewed inside.

Tollbom is a Sandpoint native; many of his first 30 years were spent at the family home on West Main Street.

Instead of a paintbrush, Tollbom said he grew up with a fishing pole in his hand, and that’s where he learned the art of patience, which is definitely a trait needed for the detailed work he does.

Tollbom didn’t start painting until he was in college, with a set of oil paints his dad had “inexplicably given to me one Christmas.” He eventually changed his major from wildlife management to art. He graduated from the University of Idaho in 1973 and began to paint fulltime, showing his work in a Spokane gallery and doing some of the art show circuit, including the Charles Russell show in Great Falls, Montana. He always had his fishing pole to catch dinner when the “starving part of being an artist pressed in.”

One of his last exhibits was two years ago at the Entrée Gallery in Nordman, a gallery featuring many prominent artists’ work, in the middle of nowhere.

In his studio at 323 N. First, where he primarily makes frames for other peoples’ work, there are mounted antlers of two huge moose he shot, along with elk antlers, and also the taxidermized head of a giant mule deer he shot in 2003, for which he was given a plaque for “Best mule deer 2003” at the Gun and Horn Show that year. Tollbom, who has painted very life-like elk and owls, has never painted a moose.

A birdwatcher from way back, on Saturday, Tollbom showed photos he took this month on vacation in Florida of gorgeous birds he wants to paint: the glossy iridescent common grackle, the Victorian crowned pigeon, which is grey-blue with elegant blue lace-like crests and red irises, and the nicobar pigeon, a colorful bird and the closest living relative to the extinct dodo bird.

In the midst of his workroom, under framing materials and works of art, sat a black leather Holy Bible, filled with highlighting, underlines, and a bulletin from his church. About his work painting wildlife, he said, “God created it. I’m still trying to imitate it the best I can,” he said, after all these years.

Susan Drinkard can be reached at susanadiana@icloud.com.