Undiscovered, but not forgotten
Published 12:00 pm Wednesday, September 1, 2004
An artist’s retrospective gathers representative selections of work produced over a lifetime, giving gallery-goers an overview of work with which they are usually already acquainted.
But art lovers who stop in at the Bainbridge Performing Arts Playhouse this month will have a double treat; they will see five decades of work from an artist whose paintings and drawings may well be fresh and unfamiliar.
Islander Esther Linden, who died last year at age 91, was known as an arts patron, but she was also, herself, a talented artist.
Forty-five of her oil paintings and works on paper, depicting portraits, still life and landscapes reveal the contour of a body of work rendered with a fine eye and a loving hand.
“I painted with her for many years,” said noted Seattle artist Gertrude Hollis, who met Linden when both were members of a select group of artists assembled under the aegis of Seattle’s Frye Museum.
“Esther Linden was one of the most talented painters in the Northwest, but you will not find her work in galleries, corporate collections, museums or juried shows,” Hollis said. “She was a very private artist and her paintings were reserved for family and friends and her own collection.”
Linden was born Esther Ostling in St. Paul, Minn., in 1912. Her family resettled in Seattle while she was still in grade school.
A contemporary of famed northwest painter Morris Graves, with whom she attended high school, Linden began painting in her teens.
She married Robert Linden and, after a hiatus from art when the couple’s daughter Janet was very young, resumed painting in 1940, attending classes through a continuing education program at Seattle’s Edison High.
After a few years, Linden advanced to the Frye for classes.
In 1935, the Lindens and their baby daughter had spend 18 months house-sitting vacant summer homes on Bainbridge – a low-rent way to pay off some medical bills.
In 1942, when Bob Linden was drafted into a job in the shipyards, the couple purchased land at Manzanita Beach and settled there in 1963.
The personable couple made many friends on Bainbridge. Among them were Greg Mesmer and Diane Bonciolini of Mesolini Glass Studio, from whom the Lindens took classes to learn how to make stained glass.
After her death, Bonciolini and Mesmer decided to curate and install a retrospective of Linden’s work.
“I feel fortunate to have had her as a friend and to be able to enjoy these paintings over the past year,” Bonciolini said.
Much of Linden’s artwork on display at BPA dates from the 1940s and 1950s and was made during Wednesday Frye group meetings.
But after the formal group disbanded, Linden continued to paint weekly with artists Lucy Vane, Marilyn Keene, Winona Blackwell, Virginia Garrett and Gertrude Hollis.
She created representational art – portraits, still lifes and landscapes executed in watercolor, oils or pastels.
Her vision began to fail in the last five years of her life. Linden was nearly blind when she died of pancreatic cancer, on July 21, 2003.
“That was probably the most frustrating for someone who enjoyed painting,” Bonciolini said. “She couldn’t paint, and she really had a love for it.”
Linden cited Cezanne as an influence on her work, but she considered herself well out of the mainstream of contemporary art theory.
“What drove her?” wrote Linden’s daughter Janet Penny. “She was a very visual person and a perfectionist.
“She considered herself a ‘painterly’ painter, with no original message. Just an honest painter with skill and an understanding of color.”
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An exhibit honors the life and work of island artist, the late Esther Linden through September at the Playhouse Gallery, with a reception 1-4 p.m. Sept. 11. Her work may also be viewed at www.theplayhouse.org. Proceeds from artwork sales benefit Kitsap County Hospice. For purchases, contact curator Diane Bonciolini of Mesolini Glass Studio at 842-7133 or mesoliniglass@earthlink.net.
