|
By Emily Hone
BLACKFOOT — For a number of years Gloria Dillard was ranked at the top of artists who painted Idaho, and her paintings, mostly of oil applied with a palette knife, have gone to homes and businesses all over the world.
She turns 88 this year, and has not lost her eye for a beautiful scene although her physical condition no longer allows her to work with the oils she loves so well.
Dillard will be having a show of her watercolor paintings, most done over the past 10 years, during Blackfoot Pride Days at Willie Preacher’s gallery at 33 W. Bridge Street from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
Preacher will have some of his own work for sale, but said he will be taking a backseat to Dillard, who was his teacher and mentor when he first began painting, and whom he credits with getting him started.
“Featuring her paintings in my gallery will be like paying her back for what she’s done for me,” he said.
Dillard’s paintings feature the things she loves most about Idaho — mountains, meadows with streams running through, log cabins, quaking aspen, and wildflowers. Most of those to be shown were painted from memory.
“I always worked from photographs taken as I traveled,” Dillard said. “I would enlarge different sections of the photographs, make them into a composite of the scene I wanted, then make a sketch and work from that.”
Her earliest oils are with a brush, but while visiting a gallery in California she observed an artist working with the palette knife and it grabbed her attention.
Deciding the palette knife would lend itself perfectly to portraying the majesty of Idaho’s mountains in places like the Stanley and Copper basins, along the East Fork of the Salmon River, Mt. Borah above Mackay and Bell Mountain in the Little Lost River Valley, Dillard tried it, but found it applied paint too heavily for the fine lines she wanted in her own paintings.
Her husband, critic, helpmate and traveling companion, Donald, solved that problem for her. “He took a kitchen knife, removed the serrated edge, and it was perfect for what I wanted,” she said.
The materials Dillard used in oil painting — turpentine for paint thinner and copal to put a gloss on her finished work eventually took their toll on her lungs, but loathe to give up art work altogether she switched to watercolors.
Dillard slowed down on her output and was doing two or three paintings a month up until 2003 when her husband, who had been her closest friend as well as sweetheart, died, and the light passed from her life.
She had the finished works framed, put them away and painted no more.
A year or so later she moved to Palouse to be near their son, Craig, but in that country of rolling hills and conifer trees grew homesick for the mountain meadows, quaking aspen and sparkling streams of Central and Southeast Idaho. She began a series of “memory” paintings during the winter of 2007 while housebound by an over abundance of snow.
Those are some of the original paintings she will be showing and selling at Preacher’s gallery, along with a couple of Monument Valley, through which she passed on her way to a show in Scottsdale, Ariz., several years ago.
Some of her memory paintings were sent to Heidi Morgan at M&H Office Supply to be made into stationery, and she will have several packets of it for sale.
“I just want people to know I’m still painting,” Dillard said, “and the show and sale might be a chance to see people I haven’t seen for a while.
|
