Shades and hues as vast and remarkable as the colors of the rainbow could be seen in the works of art presented for everyone’s enjoyment at the Princeville Community Fine Arts Exhibit.
A collection of local artwork by North Shore artists were on display at the art show at Princeville Community Center. More than 200 people attended the three-day event, which ran from Nov. 4 through Nov. 6 and featured 70 entries from 41 artists.
The art show had been on hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2019, and organizers were relieved to get the art exhibit up and running again.
Grace Hodgson, committee member and co-organizer, talked about the origin of the event and what it has meant for artists in the community.
“Thirteen years ago Jean Ann Flaherty wanted to start a fine art exhibit in Princeville. So she went before the board with her idea and convinced them to sponsor a fine art exhibit in Princeville. She came to me and Anne Schneider and Demi Goodfellow to be on a committee with her and plan it. And it’s still going. It’s amazing,” Hodgson said.
“We’ve had a wonderful time doing it, and met a lot of wonderful people who we didn’t even know were artists in Princeville. Every year more artists come before us and we’ve never seen them before. And they’re all North Shore artists.”
Hodgson also had paintings on display in the exhibit. She presented a portrait of a woman with red flowers in her hair in a blue kimono, in front of red Japanese torii gates, which often are positioned at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine.
The name of the oil painting on canvas is “Torii Gates.”
“This is a woman who lived next door to us for many, many years, and she and her husband were Japanese. She modeled for me many times. They live in Yokohama,” Hodgson said.
There were other memories associated with the painting as well.
“They sold their house. Now it’s a vacation rental, which is too bad. It was really fun to have them next door to us. We would switch kitchens. She would teach us a Japanese dish, and then we would teach her an American one,” Hodgson said.
Other artists, such as co-organizer Wally Wilson, spoke of inspiration for oil painting.
“The subject really has to grab me, because I am going to put a lot of time into it, a lot of effort. It will probably take me maybe six months or so to make a painting. Each day I work a couple hours on it,” Wilson said. “So it’s gotta be something that really grabs my interest. I always look for something that’s different.”
Wilson also pointed out his work on display, which is of a woman wearing a blue and white dress with a colorful head wrap of maroon, gold, and dark greens. The work is titled, “Sema, A Girl from Mozambique.”
“They had an article about the country Mozambique. It was an interesting story. Down at the corner of the page they had this little image of this woman,” Wilson said.
“I thought ‘Whoa! I’ve never seen a head dress like that, or a dress like that.’ I’d never seen anything like it, so it was really different, and so that’s why I painted it. I can tell you that it’s time consuming. And the light comes from both sides.”
Committee member Wicki Van Der Veer created the piece titled “Koloa Maoli.” Portrayed in her work is a mother duck with ducklings in a pond in front of a landscape of brush and mountains and tall grasses. Hues of blues, greens, browns, grays and golds all meld together on canvas to form a peaceful nature scene.
She spoke of her work.
“The painting is of the Koloa maoli duck … a very endangered bird, which lives only in this area … and lives nowhere else in the world and nowhere else on island. So I wanted to paint that painting to show the quiet life it seems to live,” Van Der Veer said.
“It’s hard to see, and it’s kind of a humble bird. So that’s the feeling I wanted from that painting was the early morning and then this quiet life that they live.”
The Princeville Community Fine Arts Exhibit is the only place where artists can put their work on display on the North Shore. There is no entry fee to put artwork in the exhibit, and all entries are accepted. All media except photography are accepted.
Artists are welcome to promote their work. The committee members who made it all possible were Luane McGowan, Michelle Amendola, Roberta Halliburton, Anne Schneider, Wilson, Van Der Veer and Hodgson.
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Monique Kemper is a lifelong North Shore resident who lives in Princeville and writes periodically for The Garden Island.
