Artist Claudia Punter shows a painting of an owl in her studio that she plans to show at The Art Gallery Osoyoos this week. (Richard McGuire photo)
Visitors to Osoyoos artist Claudia Punter’s new exhibition, The Joy of Art, at The Art Gallery Osoyoos, will be met with an eclectic mix of media and subjects.
“We’re not going to get flowers all the way around and we’re not going to get landscapes around,” said Sue Whittaker, the gallery’s curator. “We’re going to get such a variety.”
The solo exhibition opens with a reception this Friday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and runs to Sept. 29.
Although Punter became an artist later in life, she’s loved animals and nature all her life, and animals, especially birds, often feature in her paintings and sculpture.
As a little girl growing up in the lake town of Zug, Switzerland, between Zurich and Lucerne, her mother forbade her from keeping animals.
Her first pets were a little bug and a little worm, which she smuggled and hid in her room.
As she got older, her mother softened, and she was able to keep a bird, a mouse and a lizard. And she befriended a local dog that hung around outside but wasn’t allowed in the house.
Eventually in secondary school, her class had a project to incubate eggs. She asked to take home one of the hatchlings, and it grew into a rooster.
Her father put his foot down when the rooster started crowing, and he gave away the bird.
When she was 20, her love of animals led her to leave home, where she went to work on a small dairy farm milking cattle.
“I needed my animals and I was just too restricted at home,” said Punter. “That was the best time in my life when I was on that farm.”
She went on to work as a veterinarian, first with agricultural animals and later, at her own clinic, she worked with smaller animals because this allowed her to stay home.
Punter’s artistic career got off to a slower start.
As a young schoolgirl, she did a painting of a little monkey surrounded by leaves. She loved it and thought it was beautiful, but her teacher was unimpressed and squelched her, discouraging her from art for decades.
There is actually a history of art in her family. Punter’s father has long been a goldsmith, and at age 87, he still has a workshop in Zug making jewelry. His father, who died long before Punter was born, made stucco religious sculptures in churches.
But her father’s collection of modern art left her unimpressed.
“For me it was just scribbles,” she said. “I said that’s not art, that’s gross. Anybody can do that. Art for me was nothing.”
Flash forward to 1993 when Punter and her late husband immigrated to Canada and settled on an acreage near Ponoka, Alberta. They had a business working with granite, doing products such as kitchen countertops.
“In the evenings, I needed something to do, and I took a piece of soapstone and began to carve it,” she said. “I never thought that I was an artist with the soapstone. I just did it to wind down in the evenings.”
When her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and given months to live, the couple accelerated their plans to move to Osoyoos.
A visit to a show by Keremeos painter Bonny Roberts at the former Oliver Art Gallery in 2013 made a huge impression on Punter. Roberts told her she was giving a course that December.
“I said I’ve never had a brush in my hands,” Punter recalls. “She said that’s why you have to come. So, I went, and the first day was colour theory. The second day we had a canvas and we began to paint. That’s it. I loved it. I really loved it.”
Since then she’s taken workshops with numerous artists, both locally and elsewhere, drawing particular inspiration from naturalist painters Robert Bateman and Terry Isaac.
She’s a member of Artists on Main, the Okanagan Art Gallery, and the Federation of Canadian Artists, among other arts groups.
Her coming show will include acrylic and watercolour paintings, soapstone, clay and some fabric art. Although she’s begun working with oils, she’s not yet ready to show those.
Punter is modest about her work, insisting she’s not a potter or a fabric artist. And, although she spends considerable time in her studio at her home on Anarchist Mountain, and her art has been purchased by collectors in North America and Europe, she rejects the label of “professional.”
Rather, she says she creates art because she enjoys it.
“That’s why the show has the title The Joy of Art,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful thing to do something.”
The gallery is open next to Town Hall from Tuesday to Saturday, from noon to 4 p.m.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
Claudia Punter shows a painting in her studio of a heron, which she plans to show at The Art Gallery Osoyoos this week. Beside it is another heron still in progress. (Richard McGuire photo)
