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closeBeautifying Sumner City Hall
Avani Nadkarni
The 40 or so members of the Mountain Valley Art Club have one main thing in common: An amazing talent for, and an unwavering love of, all types of art.
“Art just (fulfills) a need for me,” club member and painter Lee Killmer said. “I can shut the world out when I’m doing my painting. I never hear anything else when I do it.”
City of Sumner Administrative Specialist Sally Abrams picked up on that love and talent and now coordinates for one of the club’s artists to be featured inside City Hall for about two months at a time.
The group, which consists of members from all over, such as Enumclaw, Sumner and Bonney Lake, enjoys encouraging others to find a love for art, as well. They hold meetings at the Sumner Senior Center monthly and many members, such as Killmer, also teach art classes there.
“I teach anything anybody wants to learn,” Killmer said.
Many of the members have been creating some sort of artwork all their lives, but club president Barbara Waid, a Bonney Lake resident, said she really discovered art after college.
“I painted on and off in college ... even as a child I sketched and drew,” she said. “But when my kids were young, I really got into it. It got me out of the house for one afternoon a week.”
Now, Waid said she mostly does oil paintings, although she has recently gotten her feet wet in watercolor. She takes photographs of things that she later brings to the easel, which is a contrast to Killmer, who said she generally takes newspaper and magazine clippings to give her ideas for her mostly-wildlife paintings.
“I never copy anything exactly, but I get ideas from clippings,” Killmer explained.
Although Killmer, Waid and current City Hall featured artist Georgia Heimbach are all painters, Waid said that there are a varied number of mediums used by club members. One member, Waid said, taught herself to create dried flower paintings. Another creates beautiful pieces of art by burning wood and then painting it.
Heimbach, a Mountain Valley Art Club member and Kent resident who is showing about a dozen paintings — all for sale —at City Hall right now, prefers to stick to more traditional art forms. She’s been painting her whole life, she said, after being born to a painter father.
“I do mostly landscapes,” Heimbach said. “We live in beautiful country and you kind of paint what you know.”
As witnessed in her displayed paintings, Heimbach gets her inspiration everywhere around her, from mountain landscapes to Native American-inspired depictions.
“She has some incredible oils of outdoor scenes,” Abrams raved.
Heimbach, who took a painting trip to Lake Chelan with a handful of artist friends in late June, is proud of all the members of the Mountain Valley Art Club, which began in the early 1970s. She learned of the club through artist friends and has been an active member for a decade. Members show off their artwork all around town, she said, not just City Hall. Members have had artwork displayed at Kerby’s Cafe, Dixie’s Home Cookin’, the Bread Box Lunch Company, Cafe 410 east of Sumner, as well as the post office and other area businesses.
“We kind of rotate (the artists),” she said. “I think it’s a great idea. We have an opportunity to just display our art and it makes (others) aware of our club. We get a little exposure.”
Member Juanita Beecroft, who coordinates the artists and locations, said the club has gotten a wonderful reaction.
“It’s been good, really good,” Beecroft said. “The purpose is to show the paintings. If (the public) buys one, fine, but that’s not the main thing. We want them to enjoy the paintings.”