Sunday, December 12

Christmas art, Christmas gifts: It’s a festive season

Christmas art,
The family of the late Marion Gunderson, of Rolfe, is selling prints of her art work to benefit the Rolfe library. She worked at the library for 35 years and was instrumental in getting the new library built. It opened in 2003, the year before she passed away.

"She had a vision for it," said Louise Shimon, of Perry, a daughter of Gunderson and her husband, Deane. "I know Mother would be smiling right now if she knew how her watercolors helped perpetuate projects she worked on."

Profits from selling prints of Gunderson's works will be used by the library to digitize 101 years of the Rolfe newspaper - from 1888 to 1989.

Through at least 1983, Gunderson had indexed those papers for genealogical information, which was put on microfisch at the Pocahontas library.

"This is just perpetuating a project Mother worked on with old technology," Shimon said.

Gunderson painted for most of her life, doing both realistic and abstract paintings. She even exhibited her work at the Blanden Memorial Art Museum.

"We know she started painting watercolors as early as 1933," Shimon said. "What area natives from the Rolfe/Gilmore City/Pocahontas areas have been most interested in are Mother's watercolors of grain elevators. Because of its rich reds and greens, my favorite of the three is of the Gilmore City grain elevator/train depot."

Prints have been sold for a while already, with $3,300 so far donated to the Rolfe Public Library Trust.

By the way, all the scanning and printing is being done by a Rolfe business called Wild Faces Gallery, owned by Mona and Mike Majorwicz. Prints can be seen there and also at the library.

"We know of at least 150 watercolors that she did," Shimon said. "But if anybody has a watercolor of Mother's we might not know about, we'd like them to contact us." That number is 465-2746.

So, there. You can find local art by a local artist and help out the Rolfe library at the same time. It doesn't get much better than that.





(source:messengernews.net)
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)