Local artist doesn’t let bandaged hands slow her down

By Karen Middleton
karen@athensnews-courier.com

ATHENS June 29, 2009 03:48 pm

— “I just love to go to college,” says local artist Marilyn Bachelor.
Natives of Clio, Mich., Dick and Marilyn Bachelor divide their time between a home on the Tennessee River at Bay Hill Village and a cabin at Hubbard Lake in northern Michigan. But with two sons living in Limestone County, the couple spends most of the year here.
Marilyn audits an art class two mornings a week at Calhoun Community College, where she takes instruction from Katherine Lansing Vaughn, who she says is one of the two artists that she considers her mentors. The other is Helga Flowers.
“I’ve taken over 60 workshops,” said Marilyn. “They have been taught by working artists and they are able to share that with me.”
Marilyn, who says she has been painting “seriously” for 20 years, will be among 230 artists exhibiting at the 57th Annual Arts and Crafts Festival n Fairhope. The juried show will be held March 20, 21 and 22.
She has exhibited her mixed-media works several times before at the show.
“My first recollection of painting is sitting in a homemade brown wooden fishing boat that was tied on the shore of ‘Grandpa’s lake,’” she writes in an Artist’s Statement that she distributes at shows. “That day was gray, but warm and humid. I was thrilled by the brilliant color pans in my new Prang color tin when I opened it to paint.
“Color still thrills me—watching colors move and mix, color over texture and color surprises. I enjoy seeing what juxtaposition does to color as well as the influence of light on color.”

Nurse, teacher

It was a long time between that day in her grandfather’s boat with her new set of watercolors and the time when she could become a full-time artist. After graduating from high school, she earned a Bachelors Degree in nursing from the University of Michigan. After working as an R.N. for several years, she went back to school to earn a Master of Arts Degree in education.
“I taught elementary grades, 3rd and 4th,” she said. “There was another teacher that I would switch with so I could teach the same kids two years in a row. I also taught in the gifted program.”
Dick is retired from Buick Motor Division in Flint, Mich. When Marilyn isn’t painting, the couple is usually golfing at Joe Wheeler State Park.
Marilyn holds up two bandaged hands.
“I got this from doing the two things I love best—painting and golfing,” she said. “I call it ‘trigger finger lock down.’”
The condition, for which she has had previous surgery on other fingers, causes the fingers to curl inward. She doesn’t let the surgery hamper her work schedule and devotes several hours a day in her loft studio overlooking the Tennessee River. Because of the open design of the house, she gets both northern and southern sun exposure through two large Palladian windows .
Marilyn attended a one-room country school in Michigan, as so many of her generation did in rural areas of the state. She began “town school” – in Clio, Mich., – in the seventh grade.
“I saw Dick for the first time when I was in the seventh grade,” she recalled. “After graduation, we each went to different colleges. I was at the University of Michigan and he was at Kalamazoo (Western Michigan) when he called me and asked me to come over to his school for an event. I rode the train over.”
The couple has two grown sons and two grandsons. Tragedy struck the family last year when their daughter-in-law, Kathy Bachelor, 47, was killed in an automobile accident in Lawrence County in August.
“We were really close,” said Marilyn. “Her own mother died when she was just 3.”

Celebrations of life

Marilyn’s paintings can best be characterized as a celebration of life in their rich, vibrant colors and textures. Whether abstract, still life, landscape or architectural, her paintings draw the viewer in. In the mixed-media works, she might stretch surgical gauze across the painting, paint over it, and remove it for the netting pattern. Or else she might leave the gauze in place for a textured look. The gauze can become a fisherman’s net, a part of plant life or whatever the viewer sees in that particular painting.
Marilyn also uses her other love, golf, as the inspiration for many of her light-hearted works. Golf balls placed in different situations, take on a life of their own and express political statements or states of mind or stages of life.
She has had the golf ball images, each captured in individual frames, copied to coffee mugs that she sells at craft shows but not fine art shows.
Many of the works she will exhibit in Fairhope are her representations of memories from a recent trip to Europe. The Italian gardens are especially vibrant.
She is fortunate to be able to paint for two weeks each summer on Mackinac Island with her other mentor, Helga Flowers.
Marilyn’s work can also be seen at McGraw’s Coffee House in Florence and she also exhibits at the Arts Alive show in Florence.

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