Celebrate Spring With Arts And Flowers Tea

Returning May 6 To Dana-Holcombe House

By Shannon Hicks

The Garden Club of Newtown will celebrate spring with an Arts and Flowers Tea on Sunday, May 6, from 2 to 4 pm, at The Dana-Holcombe House, 29 Main Street. The special event will feature the works of five local artists — Betty Christensen, Frank Gardner, Dick McEvoy, Ruth Newquist, and Susan Warner — with those works complemented by floral arrangements created by 13 garden club members.

The club is also pleased to announce the debut of its new cookbook, Flower Buds To Taste Buds. Filled with recipes from members and special friends, the cookbook has been priced at $10 and will be available for sale beginning Sunday afternoon. The cookbook’s cover design features an original watercolor by the artist and club member Margaret Clark.

“This event is very similar to museum presentations, where they present some of their works of art and have designers create floral arrangements to coordinate with those artworks,” Ginnie Carey, a Garden Club of Newtown member, said this week.

A few members of the garden club are actually involved in one such museum event this week. They were scheduled to be in Hartford on Thursday morning to set up an arrangement on behalf of the club at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as part of the museum’s 26th Annual Fine Art & Flowers (see story in last week’s Newtown Bee).

“This was how we started our tea,” Deb Osborne, one of the ladies going to Hartford, said this week. “We did the Wadsworth event for a few years and thought ‘Well this is fun,’ and we decided to do a similar event with local artists.”

This is the second year the garden club is presenting a spring tea at The Dana-Holcombe House.

What is nice for garden club members who choose to do an arrangement for this event is that there are much looser guidelines for a show like this than there are for a standard judged garden show.

“When having a true garden club presentation there are all kinds of parameters,” said Mrs Carey. “You have to do this, you can’t do that…

“We throw those parameters out and instead say ‘Here is a piece of art. Do something pretty, something complementary,’” she added.

Betty Christensen has lived in Newtown since 1953. She did watercolors for 45 years and then started working in oils about ten years ago. She now enjoys working in pastels as well. Many of her works — including at least one that she will be putting into the garden club event — feature Newtown, which she feels is a very special place.

She is a former curator of art for Booth Library, and was the library’s featured artist in November 2004. An exhibition that month entitled “Near And Far: Water Colors and Oils by Betty Christensen” offered 29 works ranging from small, intimately scaled oils to grand views in watercolor.

Mrs Christensen has participated in dozens of shows and exhibitions. She is an active member of the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown, Kent Art Association, and Hudson Valley Art Association, and she is an artist member of American Watercolor Society.

She is also very involved with Roaring Lambs Visual Arts Ministry, a Christian artists’ group based at Walnut Hill Community Church in Bethel, where Mrs Christensen is a member.

Frank Gardner has been an avid photographer for 25 years. He is active with Candlewood Camera Club, and was recently invited to serve as a judge of members’ works during a Flagpole Photographers Club meeting.

Mr Gardner spent two weeks at Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming last October, with one of his friends, fellow photographer Bob Berthier, where they captured frame after frame of that region’s natural beauty. Between them, they snapped more than 1,000 digital and slide photographs, editing many in the field and then again in the evenings, to come up with just under 200 pictures that they felt best exemplified their journey.

In February 2006, Mr Gardner, along with Mr Berthier and Art Anderson, presented an exhibition of their photographs at C.H. Booth Library.

Dick McEvoy has lived in Newtown for 26 years and has painted all his life. He also has a successful business consulting practice in strategic planning. In December 2005, Mr McEvoy and his friend, the artist Frank Federico, were featured in an exhibition called “American Impressionists in France” at the former River Glen Fine Arts Gallery in Sandy Hook. The exhibition featured new works in pastel, watercolor and oil by Mr Federico and new works in pastel and oil by Mr McEvoy — the result of a ten-day trip to France to two men took earlier that year.

Two of the resulting paintings from that collection will be part of Mr McEvoy’s selections for the garden club event next weekend. The third is a view of Taunton Lake as seen from the artist’s home. He paints en plein air whenever possible, and also paints from sketches and photos in his studio.

Painting has been a lifelong journey for Ruth Newquist, who told The Bee in January 2004 that it was a childhood inspiration for a love of art that led to her decision to attend Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she earned her fine arts degree. She also attended Art Students League in New York City for one year, studying under such distinguished artists as Randolph Bye, Reginald Marsh, and Frank Reilly. She also holds a master of science in art education from Southern Connecticut State University.

Today Mrs Newquist is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society and an artist member of The Salmagundi Club, an elected artist member of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, and a member of Hudson Valley Art Association and North Shore Art Association (Gloucester, Mass.). She is a fellow in the American Artist Professional League.

She is known for her SoHo cityscapes as well as New England rural and urban landscapes.

Susan Warner has lived in New Milford for the past 20 years, but grew up in Newtown and took art classes while at Newtown High School. She worked in packaging design and illustration, and dabbled in art in her spare time.

A night class in art at New Milford High School inspired her to return to painting, and she has been painting seriously ever since. She works in acrylic and oil paints.

Mrs Warner is the mother of three daughters, who are often the subjects of her paintings. She also does seascapes, flowers, and pets. She was the featured artist at C.H. Booth Library in February, when she presented an exhibition called “Serenity.”

Mrs Warner is a member of the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown and has exhibited her work in several galleries and solo shows in and around Connecticut. She has also been nominated and has received awards in recognition for her work including Best in Show for Portrait & Figure work at Mystic Arts Festival and SCAN’s Barn Gallery award.

Most of the art in the Art and Flowers Tea will be available for purchase, and the floral arrangements will be raffled at the end of the tea.

The Dana-Holcombe House is at the flagpole in Newtown. Owned by John and Jane Vouros, the beautifully decorated inn is the perfect spot to enjoy the art and flowers as well as an elegant tea prepared and served by club members.

Tickets for Art & Flowers Tea are $20 each. Checks payable to The Garden Club of Newtown should be mailed to club president Beth Caldwell, 2 Pinnacle Drive, Newtown CT 06470, as soon as possible. For more information call Ms Caldwell at 270-0665.