By Sherrie Norris
As a youngster, Bea Bumgardner began to creatively
express herself through visual art. Today, just a few months
shy of her 87th birthday, she still has in her possession
her first painting completed at age 14, a pastel appropriately
called “Dahliahs.”
“I’ve been drawing and painting all my life. It’s
just something I like to do,” she said.
One stroke at a time,
Bea Bumgardner brushes life into “Happiness,”
her most current art project, taken from a photograph
of a little girl in a Charlotte school yard. Photo
by Sherrie Norris |
As a child, she drew cartoon characters, pictures
of her classmates, and remembers well a pen-and-ink drawing
of praying hands that her grandfather kept for many years.
“I wanted to go to art school, but my daddy convinced
me that I would starve to death, so I went to business school,
instead,” Bumgardner said.
Employed 45 years as a bookkeeper with the Charlotte Dental
Laboratory, Bumgardner admits that her passion for numbers
was often upstaged by the more “artsy” side of
life that kept calling her name.
Coupled with an innate eye for the camera and an adventurous
sprit that has taken her to 70 countries, Bumgardner has
accumulated a lifetime collection of drawings, paintings
and photographs that have been inspired from nearly every
corner of the world.
Having traveled to the most remote villages of Kenya and
Tibet and through the Himalayan Mountains, China and Japan,
Bumgardner has more than 15,000 slides, many of which have
been transferred and enlarged to photographic images, inspiring
countless pieces of her artwork. The multi-talented octogenarian
has reproduced several award-winning pieces; her favorite,
“The Lion,” was brought to life on canvas from
a photo she snapped during a trip to Kenya in 1986. “A
friend of mine in Charlotte owned a travel agency and I
was able to go just about anywhere I wanted to and take
pictures for her,” Bumgardner said.
She said that from 1965-85 her artwork laid basically idle
while she did most of her traveling. “I just didn’t
paint very much for a while,” she said.
In 1988, Bumgardner moved to Boone with area native Hilma
Critcher, her very closest friend for 65 years, who she
had met while both worked with children in a Charlotte church.
“I had visited Boone many times and got to know and
love the people here. I decided to move here when Hilma
came back home,” she said.
Burmgardner planned to use her golden years to focus on
something she loved to do and she’s done just that.
The walls of her home are covered in art of varying degree,
her in-home studio filled to capacity.
“I have never stuck with just one way of doing things.
I do a lot of mixed-media work – watercolor, acrylics,
pastels, etc.,” she said.
Pointing from one framed piece to another on her walls,
she explains, “That one is a charcoal of a Japanese
village on a snow day that I saw while passing through on
a train.”
Of another, she describes, “That baboon hugging its
newborn was in tree tops, Kenya. … And those giraffes
in that one are from Kenya, as were those zebras and gazelles.”
A striking pose that quickly captures the attention of visitors
to her home is her larger-than-life recreation of a snow-covered
Ladakhi man, smiling broadly in the Himalayans.
Bumgardner emphasizes that it’s not only the scenes
and memories from afar that take her back time and again
to her studio. “That barn I painted there is in Valle
Crucis and that church is over in Bat Cave,” she said,
pointing to another wall of her home.
Having developed her own style of art, she has also enjoyed
workshops by local artist Kevin Beck. “He has inspired
me to do some on-site art that is called plein air, but
at my age, it’s sometimes too much trouble to get everything
outside, and then if it starts to rain, you’ve got
to get everything packed back up and get inside before it
gets ruined.”
Other local artists such as Timberlake and Tumbleston have
also proved motivational for her.
Bumgardner enjoys being involved in two local art groups
– the High Country Water Society and the Blue Ridge
Art Clan in West Jefferson, the association of both offering
inclusion into various galleries and shows.
Independently, she held a “one-man show” in Hendersonville
several years ago, and has also had her work exhibited in
other locations, including those in Charlotte before relocating
to here, the Jones House in Boone, Lees-McRae College, Ashe
County Arts Council, in hospitals and other public venues
“that need to be decorated for a while.”
Currently, her latest original oil panting, called “Lilacs,”
is included in the Shadow of the Hills Show at the Gallery
of the Ashe Arts Center in West Jefferson.
“I finished that painting about1:30 on a Saturday morning
when it was due to hang that afternoon,” she said.
One of her current works in progress is “Happiness,”
an acrylic being transformed from a photograph taken years
ago of a little girl in a Charlotte schoolyard.
When asked the number of paintings she has done, she just
smiled and shook her head. “I guess somewhere over
a hundred. I really don’t keep count of them,”
she said.
And, her work is not for sale these days. “I have given
away more than I’ve ever sold,” she said.
Art and photography have been therapeutic for her through
the years, she says, indicating that she never “really”
went to a doctor until she was 80.
“One time I had pneumonia, and as a child, and scrapes
and bruises. I did have appendicitis, but I’ve never
been sick,” she said.
Bumgardner said she’s been referred to as a “health
nut” on occasion. “I don’t eat pork or beef,
dairy or wheat and not much of anything else. I eat soy
products and healthy stuff and try to stay active,”
she said.
She enjoys attending church at Mount Vernon Baptist and
likes to travel with the senior citizens group. She reads,
watches “some television when I can find something
decent,” and attends cultural arts events in Boone.
Bumgardner shares a home in Boone with her sister, whose
side of the duplex is used only as a vacation residence,
but she is always surrounded by friends who love her and
claim her as one of their own.
She has found peace in these mountains and since moving
here, more time to do what she loves best – one snap
of the camera, one stroke of the brush at a time.
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