Woodlot Mother and Grandson at Bond Butte Pond

Tomorrow my new painting will be due for "This Everlasting Valley II" at River Gallery, Independence, Oregon, May 5 through July 5.

The day before it is due I started making a small change and ended up repainting most of the painting to pop out the figures while establishing a path for the eye to explore and come back to the figures.

The purpose of my painting is to paint an update on the painting, "Mother Thinning Woodlot" my other painting that will also be on exhibit.

Celebrating volunteers and donations for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wild Life my painting is of Woodlot Mother sharing the pond where her trees are now embracing a hatch of warm water fish at an I5 Freeway pond. The pond was dredged out to build up the highway over the wetland farms. The painting is nearing completion. Next the submerged tree will embrace the fish like the grandmother embracing her grandson.

Diane Widler Wenzel’s Journey in Paint

All my paintings put together chronologically are a pictorial journal of my life. For 44 years some of my journey is Willamette Valley farming, forestry and fisheries starting from when I helped my husband to be, Donald Wenzel, plant trees near Vernonia, Oregon. I painted us trout fishing from a row boat among the flooded snags at Quarts Lake. At the Cooper Mountain Wenzel Farm I painted him on the antique family tractor putting up hay bales. Then we married in 1965 and moved away. Twenty years later we moved back to Oregon. We settled in a North Albany neighborhood with farm pasture and forest in our back yard.

Our neighbor, Dian Gerstner, is a true stewardess of the earth as she cares and tends her overgrown Christmas tree lot, harvesting firewood, and removing dead trees. She is the Mother of the Woodlot, the subject of my painting of 1999.

I painted a series telling the story of how we sold our pasture lot in 2007. The fir trees were cut down to make way for a house.

One of the paintings was a dream that did not materialize with our trees. My dream was that the root balls were placed in a pond where the tangled roots provided shelter for small newly hatched fish. This painting may have helped to inspire my husband to volunteer his logging skills.

April 2008 many of Mother Woodlot’s pine trees had dead tops and the lower branches of the trees were thick masses of dead dry fuel – a real danger for a possible hot wild fire. The cleaning up of the fire hazard was a must to ensure the safety of the encroaching urban development. Mother Woodlot donated some of her smaller trees and brushy branches to enhance the fish habitat on Bond Butte Pond near Halsey - a large freeway lake where gravel was dredged out to raise the I5 Freeway above the wet lands. My husband volunteered his logging skills working more than full time for over a month. He chain sawed out dense limbs. He pulled out less healthy trees with the tractor and put them in big piles for hauling. He arranged for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to hire a logging trucker for the purpose of knocking down larger trees and transporting three loads to streams.

What an unexpected joy awaited me when I first visited Bond Butte Pond and saw how the pond is being transformed from a scar on the landscape to a park of great beauty enhancing the farm land of the Willamette Valley as well as providing recreational warm water fishing and abundant wildlife. Thus I have come a long way to paint “Grandmother and Grandson in the Fishery Created from her Trees – Bond Butte Pond.”

Diane Widler Wenzel Bio
Recording my Journey in Paint

Education :

1966 Bachelor of Science Degree with high honors in drawing and painting,
Portland State College, Portland, Oregon.

Solo Exhibitions
2009 May, Recent Journey, Sam’s Station, Corvallis
November ’08 – January, Of the Oregon Coast, Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport,
2008 “Hidden Dragons,” Sam’s Station, Corvallis
“Dragons Boogie Woogie,” Enid Joy Mount Gallery, Keizer Art Association
2005 “ A Vase of a Hundred Flowers” Pegasus Art Gallery, Corvallis
2003 “Trip to Tibet” Albany City Hall
2001 “Personal Symbols,” Footwise Window, Corvallis
2000 “Alaska Watercolors,” Boccherini’s Coffee Shop, Albany
“Robinson House Series,” Footwise Window, Corvallis
1999 “Watercolors,” Albany City Hall
“Waves in Abstract,” Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport, Oregon
1998 “Water Impressions,” Illustrated Garden Gallery, Corvallis
“Watercolors and Acrylics,” New Morning Bakery, Corvallis
1993 Good Samaritan Hospital, Corvallis
Arts and Letters Gallery, Albany
1986 Two Rivers Market, Albany
1978 The Nut Loft, Aloha
My Studio, Clover Bldg., Bellingham
1969 Interactive Painting with Installation, Magnolia Gallery, Bellingham
Parlor Gallery, Portland, Oregon
1968 Hamman's Gallery, Bellingham, Washington
1967 Courtyard Gallery, Illahe Hills Country Club, Salem
Lake Oswego and Beaverton Public Libraries
La Points Department Store, Salem
1966 The Loft Theater Gallery, Tucson, Arizona

Group Exhibitions

2007 acrylic paintings, “Four Women Seven Years Later”
Benton County Historical Museum, Philomath, Or
Feathers, Fins and Fire,” a group of three painters
La Selles Stewart Center, Oregon State University Corvallis, Oregon
2006 This Bountiful Place, Portland ,Oregon
1999 13 watercolors and acrylics,
“Four Women Artists Celebrating the Seasons of Life,”
Benton County Historical Museum