LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
The Making of an Artist |
by Mary Ann Benyo |
Julie Baxendell is proud to have her work on display this month at the Blue Moon Restaurant in Rehoboth Beach in a one-person show featuring landscapes (including her traditional obsession with boats!) from a recent trip to Italy, and an earlier visit to Portugal. Working lately in oils, she enjoys the same intuitive use of color she's had since childhood.
Baxendell has always wanted to be an artist. Her first piece to be displayed in a gallery, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, was a simple painting done in oils. She still has it, a still life depicting pears and apples on a pedestal with a good composition and an excellent use of color. The museum classified it as a "primitive style" piece. They didn't know she was only eight. After graduating from art school (University of the Arts in Philadelphia) where she majored in illustration, Baxendell found work more readily as a graphic designer, doing illustrations now and then. She became the driving force behind the graphic design business she started with her husband. She met with their clients to determine what they needed, juggled the schedule for those who needed things done yesterday, did most of the artwork and layout herself, and delivered the finished jobs to the customer's office and the printer, where she oversaw production. She also assumed most of the responsibility for raising three kids and running the household, since those were the days when cooking and cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping were "women's work." "That's just what women did back then," she says as if it were no big deal, although she does remember once working fifty-four straight hours with lots and lots of coffee. She'd wanted to paint, but after a long day as a designer, mother and housewife combined, she didn't have the time or the energy. Years later, after the kids were grown and I came into the picture, she "retired" to Milton and we became innkeepers for another dozen years. In between the multitude of chores to run the Honeysuckle Inn for women, she was still doing part-time graphic design and illustration workand still wanting to paint. Giving up her role as innkeeper was hard in some ways, but it did allow her to finally make the time to become an accomplished fine artist known for her unusually bold watercolors, and now oils. Today, Baxendell's resum boasts a fellowship grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts for an established professional painter, as well as an entry in a national juried show in Wayne, Pa. and several awards from the Children's Beach House in Lewes. She's been steadily making a name for herself in dozens of local shows. She's been an active member of the Rehoboth Art League for the last eight years, and a founding member of the Artists' Exchange, who meet monthly to share critiques of their work in progress. Their last show together was in March at the Peninsula Gallery in Lewes. Baxendell's opening reception at the Blue Moon is Saturday, April 5, from 2-4 p.m. The show will hang through the month of April. She hopes you will come and celebrate her success. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 13, No. 3, April 4, 2003 |