1% for Art

A fun art story.   MY dil sent me an email from her good friend with a link to that friend’s new Seattle city Councilwoman’s newsletter (we used to be in the same district, but this was just changed, or I would have received this too.    Among other news the council member related was that her office got to select art for their City Hall office from the city’s 1% for Art Program……and an old painting of mine was among the 6 pieces pictured!   do I remember this painting?  sort of.  Do I remember how it got to the 1% for Art program.  Nope.  (this program was started here in 1973 which sets aside 1%of capital improvement  project funds for the commission purchase and installation of art in a variety of places.  The history of such programs is interesting..dates back to FDR and his New Deal.)  But I did a bit of research on my shelves and do see I have “Seattle City Light” in collections listed on my resume. Which ended up here in their big collection.   And I have photos from this gallery show in 1983 but nothing like a list of paintings or what went where.  I was terrible at bookkeeping (is anyone surprised?)   


  I’d love to know where all those paintings are…..I have only 2  (actually, 3!) from this series of Island oil on paper paintings…the blip is one, on my wall…which you can’t appreciate  because of the reflection with other artwork, (which, like double photos, I like) ) .  The extra is now at City Hall….it’s called Jost Van Dyke and on the council website it says “ Jost Van Dyke 1982, Karen Berry, Seattle artist Karen Berry’s rendered a flattened landscape that could be representative of the Dutch Terrain.  Without an explanation for the title of the painting, we are left to surmise that this artist is drawing a parallel between a Dutch name and a Dutch landscape.”    (!)     Should I write and tell her that it’s the name of an island in the BVIs in the Caribbean where we recently had had a sailing trip?   The island MAY be named after a 17th C Dutch privateer, Joost van Dyk, who used these harbors as a hideout.    Don’t have the names of all the other paintings in this series, but H remembers the blip was from The Baths, a beach area on the island of Virgin Gorda in the BVIs.
   
All another life….all that artwork AND all those lovely trips!
sorry for too many words....