Lost and Found Landscapes lead Lake Street Studios summer series

By Katie Dunn

Sun contributor

Friday nights in Glen Arbor during summer months are especially lively: Art’s Tavern is reliably packed; Boones’ deck is bustling with families, and the sound of live music there fills the air; squadrons of kids meander Western Avenue, their ice cream melting down their hands and wrists; and, what seems like countless folks migrate, almost religiously so, to Sleeping Bear Bay to catch a glimpse of the fleeting sun.

Also on Friday nights here in Glen Arbor, the visual arts are celebrated: locals, summer residents, and tourists alike congregate at the weekly art openings held at Lake Street Studios Center Gallery (LSSCG). These openings run every Friday evening from 6 to 8pm, late June through mid-August. There, the featured artist greets and engages with attendees. In a typical summer season, eight different artists are selected to display their work. The media varies—primarily painting, but on occasion multi-media work is also shown. Refreshments are served (this will mark my third summer as the official volunteer wine-pourer!), and oftentimes music accompanies these convivial affairs—be it a slated musician or a spontaneous strumming of the guitar by local art devotee, Duncan McPherson.

Friday night art openings were the ingenious creation of venerated Glen Arbor artist Suzanne Wilson who conceived of them back in 1990. Allison Stupka, Wilson’s daughter and owner of LSSCG, recalls that Glen Arbor based artist, Greg Sobran, was the very first artist ever featured at these summer openings. (My mother, Kathleen Dunn, showed her pastels and oil paintings at the LSSCG Friday night openings several times during the 1990s.) This year marks its 33^rd anniversary.

To commence the 2023 season, Northern Michigan artist Wendy McWhorter’s work will be on display from Friday, June 30 through Thursday, July 6. Her body of work is entitled: Lost and Found Landscapes which is comprised of 20 oil paintings of the Port Oneida Rural Historic District and the surrounding area. “These paintings portray my vision of what the original homesteaders planted, which no longer blooms, but through the poetry of painting is reimagined,” shared McWhorter.

Stupka had not met or known of McWhorter prior to enlisting her for the 2023 season. “I was made aware of Wendy’s work when a patron of Center Gallery recommended that I see her work … Often artists who show for the first time at Center Gallery I only know through their paintings, and that is part of the joy of Center Gallery for me—getting to know these wonderful artists.”

“I admire Wendy’s directness in her landscape painting. She is not afraid to make a yellow leafed tree yellow! Her paintings have a simple feeling to them which for me is how I sometimes engage with this amazing landscape up here. I walk up a dune and it looks pink in the morning light, and it just knocks my socks off. Her paintings for me have that feel,” Stupka elaborated.

McWhorter is an oil painter based out of Kewadin near Torch Lake. Despite being an Antrim County resident, she has deep roots in, and is intimately connected with, Leelanau County—and Glen Arbor, in particular.

“My introduction to the area was by attending Northwestern Michigan College, and my parents owned one of the first condos at The Homestead on Lake Michigan. I fell in love with the Big Lake, the Sleeping Bear Dunes, and the historic homesteads,” McWhorter explained.

McWhorter was born in Flint and raised in nearby Grand Blanc. She attended public schools there, graduating from Grand Blanc High School in 1973, and then enrolling at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) where she spent the following two years studying art. “I dabbled in everything from painting, printmaking, metalworking to ceramics,” McWhorter recounted. Also, Michigan State University (MSU) sponsored a summer course in fine arts at The Old Art Building in Leland that McWhorter attended in 1974 and the following year. That, essentially, cemented her affection for Leelanau County.

After two years at NMC, and a gap year skiing out west, McWhorter transferred to Indiana University where she continued her pursuit of the arts—experimenting with a variety of media. Ultimately, however, McWhorter enrolled at MSU where she earned her degree in advertising in 1979.

With her degree, McWhorter worked for several years in the newspaper industry. She contributed to familiar publications, such as the Traverse City Record-Eagle and the Lansing State Journal. Finding the work too difficult to juggle with motherhood (she and her husband, Tom McWhorter, were raising two young children at the time), McWhorter returned to the arts, receiving a post-degree certification in Art Education in 1999 from Eastern Michigan University where her paternal grandmother, likewise, received her art teaching degree.

McWhorter taught art at several school districts in downstate Michigan before arriving at the Lansing School District in 2002 where she continued art instruction. Finally, McWhorter brought her laudable 23-year commitment to public education to an end in 2013. Soon thereafter, she and her husband settled in the Torch Lake area where they still reside today with Maggie, their ginger cat, and Oliver, their Pomeranian.

McWhorter’s affinity for the arts harkens back to her early childhood. “When I was eight years old, my father enrolled me in ‘Saturday Art Classes’ at the Flint Institute of Art (FIA). My grandmother insisted I take classes there. My passion ignited then, and I continued my studies in the arts and education,” she remembers. Additionally, the American and European collections of the FIA had a profound impact on McWhorter in her formative years.

“The Flint Art Institute has John Singer Sargent’s ‘Garden Study,’ a portrait of a brother and sister watering lilies rooted in a vibrant emerald green background. The contrast of the white flowers against that green made an impression on me when I was eight years old. When mixing greens for the landscapes, I often think of Sargent’s use of green in the painting, and how the green envelopes the figures as if they grow just like the lilies,” reflected McWhorter.

Landscape painting is McWhorter’s preferred genre: “My intent is to depict the land and record the vernacular buildings of the past through an impressionistic lens.” Notwithstanding its many attendant challenges—wind, moisture, shifting light, buzzing insects overhead—plein air painting is how McWhorter best captures her unique vision of the natural world.

“Landscapes are my favorite, especially when I can paint in the fresh air—plein air. The senses come alive through seeing the light and shadows change, the air moving around, the birds and the water sounds, and the smell of the earth. There is nothing that compares,” shared McWhorter.

Of deep influence on McWhorter’s work is the German-born American artist, Wolf Kahn (1927-2020). Like McWhorter, Kahn worked primarily in oils, depicting the natural world in all its glory. His paintings were essentially a meditation on landscape where light and color relate in such a way that horizons—sky and land—fuse almost seamlessly. McWhorter adheres to that same aesthetic: the wonderous convergence of light and color.

“I saw Wolf Kahn’s work in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2003, and then drove around the area nearby where he lived. I saw the hills and faded barns, and the pastel and vibrant colors of those vistas in a new way through his eyes,” McWhorter remembered.

McWhorter, in a sense, emulates Kahn’s approach to color. As Kahn espoused: “I am always trying to get to the danger point, where color either becomes too sweet or too harsh; too noisy or too quiet.”

As for McWhorter: “I paint in a high key palette as it allows for more vibrant color as well as harmony between colors. The kinetic brushstrokes I use in concert with my color choices convey movement and spontaneity in nature and represent a sense of peace. The elements of color and texture create poetry on the surface of my paintings.”

American painter, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), likewise, is of great inspiration for McWhorter. As with McWhorter, his subjects are primarily landscapes, rendered in vivid colors. For McWhorter, Porter “is another artist I look to for his simplification of form and his subject matter of water, vegetation and old homes.”

“Both Kahn and Porter use the technique of ‘Lost and Found Edges’ in painting, which in terms of my style is to not overstate detail that would distract from the impact of the work. Shapes that are not hard-edged, but instead are rounded, softer, more approachable, and pleasing to the eye,” McWhorter said.

McWhorter has displayed her work at a several venues throughout northern Michigan: Crooked Tree Gallery in Petoskey, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Glen Arbor Arts Center, the Dennos Museum in Traverse City, Charlevoix Circle of the Arts, True North Interior Design in Charlevoix, and True Blue Gallery in Alden. McWhorter also was recognized by the Traverse City Art Center with its People’s Choice Award in 2015. Additionally, a work of hers is included in the publication Art of the Sleeping Bear Dunes: Transforming Nature into Art. (Leelanau Press p. 87, 2013)

McWhorter continues to be an exceedingly prolific artist, and her energy seems to know no bounds. This September she will teach an art class at Interlochen Arts Academy entitled “Painting with Petals.”

“Of late, I’ve been interested in the sustainability of using natural materials for painting by removing petals from lowers and boiling them in water, and then, after they have soaked, they are strained from the liquid which I then bottle and use for watercolor. What is more natural than using petals from a wild phlox to paint a phlox! I’m teaching a class about this process at Interlochen Arts this September. Participants will paint flowers with wildflowers diffused from petals harvested locally,” McWhorter shared.

McWhorter is also heavily invested in Arts for All of Northern Michigan (Arts for All). Founded in 1993, Arts for All is a non-profit organization that offers arts and cultural experiences to connect people of all abilities. “I create and teach units of art that integrate science and literacy for intellectually and physically disabled adults, ages 18-26,” she said.

McWhorter represents another remarkable, emerging female artist from Leelanau County area. Consider immersing yourself at the very first Friday night opening at LSSCG, and experiencing McWhorter’s luminous, radiating iterations of very familiar fields, dunes, and historic structures.