Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
In a place of Atlantic sands and citrus, she paints the Palouse.
Arlene Ambuehl, Chicago native and oil painter from Indian Lake Estates, Fla., started to paint the faraway place 11 years ago when her husband was buried in Garfield.
Now she has amassed a small collection. She has donated the prints of on greeting cards for sale to the Palouse Community Center.
“I’ve fallen in love with the Palouse,” said Ambuehl. “If I could, I’d move there year-round.”
Since 2001 she has visited once a year to visit her friend, Iris Holway-Price, whom she met while Price facilitated the funeral of Ambuehl’s husband, Harold Ambuehl, who grew up in Fife and is buried in Garfield next to his first wife, the former Jean Wilson, daughter of Ivor Wilsons, who once owned a jewelry store in Colfax.
Arlene plans another visit to the Palouse in July.
“I’m going to drive up, and I’m going to sit out in the fields and paint,” she said. “I can hardly wait to get up to those golden colors, the greens and the sky.”
Ambuehl’s journey to the Palouse began during Christmas, 1981, when she flew out of Chicago to visit relatives in Miami. Her cousin set her up for a week of double-dating with a widower she knew from ballroom dancing.
At the time, Ambuehl worked for a vice-president in real estate at a downtown Chicago bank, while using her fine arts degree from Northwestern on the side.
She had just decided on a life change.
“I had made up my mind to quit working and search for a smaller town to live in and go into banking,” she said.
Arriving in Miami, Ambuehl’s cousin and her boyfriend had her plans set for the holiday.
“We went to double-date that whole week,” said Ambuehl. “We went out five times in that seven days.” After Arlene was initially indifferent towards Harold, at the end of the week he flew them all down to Key West in his single-engine Beech Sierra. They went to a ballroom dance.
“We had the same old-world values and traditions,” Ambuehl said.
Three years later, she married Harold who was a publisher and distributor of tourist books. A Navy veteran, he had met Fidel Castro while orchestrating the construction of a pulp and paper plant in Cuba in the ‘50s.
“So I guess that was my Christmas present,” Ambuehl said. The wedding took place at the Old Stone Methodist Church in Key West.
Once married, she and Harold began a life together that included dancing, golfing, fishing and traveling.
She put the painting aside, but in 1995 decided to resume her work.
“Where was my old easel that my husband bought years ago? I thought. I went to the shed and there it was propped up and just waiting for me to take it out, set it up and start painting,” said Ambuehl. She began to painting still-lifes and florals.
“I really got inspired in landscapes once I got a look at the Palouse,” she said.
Ambuehl paints the vistas of the Palouse with water-soluble oil paint. She has never exhibited her paintings, although a photograph she took from Kamiak Butte won Best in Show in the 2009 Lake Wales, Fla., Municipal Art Show.
She indicated that since she lives in coastal Florida, most people have not heard of the Palouse, and she doesn’t try to change that.
“I really don’t talk to people about the Palouse,” she said. “I don’t want them all going up there. I want to keep it to myself.”
After Harold died in 2001, Ambuehl said she started to seriously paint what she had seen in that particular swath of eastern Washington into Idaho. On visits, she would take pictures, make sketches and color notes and then go back to Miami and paint.
“Iris took me down some backroads and I saw some wonderful scenes just waiting to be painted,” said Ambuehl. “You can thank her for getting me on this track.”
Last year, Iris told her about the community center being built in Palouse. Ambuehl had a box of greeting cards of her paintings which she used for sending notes and letters.
She decided to offer them for the community center effort. They portray five different scenes.
“We appreciate what she has done,” said Librarian and Community Center volunteer Bev Pearce. “It’s an extra bonus when we have someone that loves the area and wants to help our town.”
The card sales benefit the Community Center through the Xenodican Club, a longtime Palouse organization which created the first library in town. Iris is a member.
The Community Center has an outstanding construction loan of approximately $150,000 to pay off.
Ambuehl will leave Indian Estates, Fla., at the end of June in her 2006 Lincoln. Her route to the Palouse is flexible, as is her travel time.
“We’ll just see which way the wind is blowing,” she said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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