art beat / By Helen Sanderson

A sunbeam in the studio

(June 14, 2007) Janie Walsh’s life work on sale this weekend

Janie Walsh didn’t want me to wait for her. She said to head on back to the studio; she’d get there eventually. “Getting old’s not for sissies,” she called out with a laugh from the hallway, plodding slowly outside with a walker she painted in bright colors.

‘Evening Star’ by Janie Walsh. Photo by Helen Sanderson.

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This weekend, June 16 and 17, Walsh is letting go of her life’s work — over 500 paintings and sketchbooks — offering it all at a garden sale at her home on Buhne Street in Eureka.

As I waited for her in the studio in the backyard, I figured my interview with Walsh, a longtime advocate for the local art scene, had tearjerker written all over it. Here’s a woman, a widow, one month shy of 90 years old, cute as anything, selling off a visual diary of her life: self-portraits, landscapes from her world travels, street scenes of tiny Humboldt towns that don’t even exist anymore. Decades worth of perspective — poof, gone.

But it turns out she’s not sad about it. Last Thursday morning over coffee, we sat in her chilly studio, surrounded by paintings, talking about the past. Walsh, a lifelong Humboldt County resident, said simply that it’s time to get rid of all this stuff. She doesn’t want her daughters to have to deal with it someday when she’s gone. Instead of sentiment, she offered little waggish insights (“Oh, Lord, I was too prolific,” or, “Those price tags are tacky but I’m too old to care”) that seemed to underscore a sense of detachment she has toward her belongings. This collection has become clutter, both in her house and in her mind.

“They’re just artifacts now,” she said. “The satisfaction comes while you’re doing it — when it’s over, it’s over.”

And lately, it’s harder for Walsh to find satisfaction in art. She had a stroke two years ago and it left her with limited mobility. Painting, she said, has become “terribly frustrating.” She still gives it a try now and then and recently worked on some sketches but, she said, “It’s not like it used to be.”

Walsh is lanky and tall. Her blue eyes, framed by wrinkles, have a sort of mischievous twinkle. It’s not hard to picture her as the coltish tomboy she describes, growing up in Freshwater in the 1920s, taking her homemade boat out on the crick, catching pollywogs, doodling. Her mother was never able to keep paper in the house, on account of all the drawing she did.

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