Amber Jean’s pickup bumps and lurches from side to side heaving down the rutted dirt road through the wind whipped snow.

She is explaining her ideas about art as she chauffeurs two visitors down from her cabin in the Wineglass area above Livingston.

Suddenly, the big truck slows to a crawl.

“It’s like the clutch isn’t going in,” Jean mutters.

The pickup rolls forward, not quite catching. She fiddles with the gearshift. Suddenly, she’s off again.

“It’s been a shock to me that I’ve sold everything I’ve done,” says the wood sculptor. “A lot of my work has symbolic and mythological references, and I think that’s why it has such broad appeal.”

Outside the truck, the sky has turned to white, and blended seamlessly into the ground. “Look at this. You can’t see anything,” Jean says.

She’s not sure if the truck is still on the road. She cranks down the driver’s side window and sticks her head out. The snow flies into Jean’s face as she navigates the rig back onto the road, still talking about her art. Her next project might be ranch gates, she explains.

“I’m interested in doors and passage ways, and boxes and edges,” she says, dripping wet with melted snow.

For the last 12 years, Amber Jean’s life has resembled her driving. Rough and tumble, barely in control, but certainly never dull.

An artist of growing prominence, she takes chain saws and chisels to logs, finding figures and shapes, animals and characters. Her intricate colorful totems won her a people’s choice award as the best of 60 emerging artists at a Los Angeles Art Expo last October.

While Jean’s now self-sufficient as an artist, that’s a relatively new development.

Born Amber Jean Reinhard (she uses a shortened version professionally), she graduated from Bozeman High School in the mid-1980s. Since then, she has attended art school in Germany and Philadelphia (where she briefly lived in a nunnery), and worked as a model and wilderness ranger.

She decided to devote herself to art full time three years ago, when a friend offered her a free place to live.

Free, but not easy. With the cabin perched on top of a mountain without plumbing or electricity, Jean had to hike a mile from the end of the road.

“It was sort of like living in a firetower,” she said. “That year of my life, it was the place for me to be. I was freed up financially, but I had to pack all my wood up on my back.”

Her living quarters have since become more civilized, but only slightly. She’s moved into a bigger cabin that now has power, but still no plumbing. But electricity, she has discovered, has its benefits.

“The two biggest things were that I could have a (work) shop at home, and even bigger was the telephone connection, for the business part of being an artist,” she said. “the telephone and the Internet.”

It was through the Internet that Jean heard about the Los Angeles exhibit, and she was selected for the show after its exhibitors inspected her web site (www.amberjean.com).

The irony, she said, is that while technology is providing her with a market for her art, collectors are attracted to her rough-hewn lifestyle.

“People gave me validity as an artist as soon as they heard I don’t have running water.” She said. “They sort of romanticize it.”

And Jean has no interest in perpetuating the myth.

“I’m not trying to make a statement,” she said. “I can’t wait to get a tub.”

Art collectors aren’t the only ones interested in Jean, however.

“Penthouse offered me a lot of money,” she said. “It was sort of the hermit-up-on-the-mountain motif. I think they wanted me to pose with my chainsaw.”

She demurred. “ I don’t want to see me on a wall with some staples up my middle,” she said.

And while the money might have tempted Jean, it may not for long. Her career has now branch out in several different directions, and she carves designs for Big Sky carvers and private commissions as well as pieces for galleries, which can fetch up to $9,000.

Currently, Jean’s focus is on private commissions, ranging from totem polls to humidors, and much of which is western and fish themed (she calls the style “fishyville”. She figures the commissions will be able to fund her dream of running water and her own private workshop.

That may disappoint the gallery owners around the state who sell her carvings and love her work.

“The pieces we’ve sold of hers go to big collectors.” Said Stacy Nybo, who works at the Toucan Gallery in Billings. “The color and texture that she achieves with her carvings, the mythology that goes behind it, the thought that goes into each piece, it’s entirely personal.”

Jean is back in the truck.

The snow has let up slightly and she’s explaining her master plan.

She wants to build her shop and get her plumbing and eventually a new home up on her hill, one with ceilings high enough to show the tall totems she carves.

Eventually, she said, her art might move away from wood and toward other mediums. But today, she’s focused on carving a trout-themed frame for a mirror that someone commissioned.

“This is the Western thing,” she said, almost apologetically. “This is fishyville. I’m going to be in fishyville for a while. But fishies will get me my shop.”