Do you have an artist in your family? Or maybe you are the artist in your family’s current generation, and have a distant relative who has influenced you, down through the ages?
“If so, you’ll love the July show at Orcas Senior Center, ‘Celebrating Our Artistic Heritage,’” said Sue Lamb, chair of the senior center’s Visual Arts Committee.
Island residents have submitted works in varied media done by their relatives. A reception will be held Friday, July 15 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Orcas Senior Center.
Trudy Erwin, who with her mother, the late Julia Crandall, started Orcas Island Pottery in 1953 after purchasing the site from its first operators, provided a tantalizing taste of Crandall’s work: a group of covered jars depicting family.
On the poster for the exhibit is a copy of a print that now hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. It is by Jeannine Lehmann Rodenberger’s great grandfather, Carl Peter Lehmann (1794-l876). A print by him also is hanging in the show. His son Emil, also an artist, emigrated to the U.S.
“In putting together the exhibit, we discovered that each relative had fabulous stories about ‘their’ artist,” Lamb said.
For instance, Susan Mustard lent a portrait that her father, Jack Mustard, drew of her mother when both were students at Kansas State University during World War II. Another artist, Vargas, had chosen Jean Mustard as one of the four most beautiful women on the college scene that year.
Jean Putnam’s daughter Jeannie Doty brought two of her mother’s works: a 1985 map of the San Juan Islands and a 1995-ish watercolor.
Carl Bonelli, a cartoonist for the Oregon Journal, is represented by memorabilia, including the framed drawing “Bathing Party.” His daughter Mary Greenwell noted that while she was in college he sent her messages in Morse Code.
Mary Hatten’s great uncle, George Thomson, whose paintings hang in the National Museum in Ottawa, visited Eastsound in the 1930s. In the current show is a painting depicting the landscape between the Donohue house on North Beach Road and North Beach itself, with pools of water standing in the fields and peat bogs where the airport now lies.
These and many more pieces are hanging in the show, which will be up until Aug. 5.
