Orange City artist's work to be exhibited

Painting and prints by Orange City artist Elinor Noteboom will be on display Oct. 2–30 in Northwestern College’s Te Paske Gallery. Entitled “Prolonged Tranquility,” the exhibition features images that compare and contrast Iowa fields with the Zen gardens of Buddhist monks.

Inspiration for the series came in 1984 during a trip with other Iowa artists to the Des Moines sister city of Kofu, Japan. While visiting gardens in the city of Kyoto, Noteboom was impressed with the careful arrangement of boulders, plants and raked pebbles designed to encourage meditation and a sense of tranquility. Returning home, she recognized those same patterns in the landscape of northwest Iowa and began to paint them using a minimalist style—experimenting with color, lines, shapes and symmetry.

Noteboom earned an associate’s degree in elementary education from Northwestern Junior College in 1949 and a bachelor’s degree in art education from Northwestern College in 1973. She taught art for a decade at Orange City Christian School and a year at Unity Christian High School. After raising her family, she set up a studio in her home and became an accomplished printmaker, painter and liturgical designer.

Noteboom’s prints and tapestries are part of public and private collections in the United States, the Netherlands, France and Japan. An authority in the art of screen printing, she has written articles published in the Journal of the Print World and Screenprinting magazine and was a speaker at the International Printmaking Conference held in Bristol, England, in 1999. An Iowa Arts Council grant helped fund her work on “Prolonged Tranquility,” which has been displayed at the University of South Dakota, Iowa State University, Dordt College, and the Witter Gallery in Storm Lake, Iowa.

The Te Paske Gallery is located in Northwestern’s Korver Visual Arts Center on Highway 10 at 214 8th St. SW in Orange City. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to midnight Sunday.