Marie & Roger Granat: Two artists, two styles in-residence

Some artists paint for money; others paint for life. Marie and Roger Granat paint for the relaxation and pleasure of trying a new technique, or a new style.

            This couple is enjoying retirement from full-time careers by doing what they want and when they want.

Their home is a gallery. From the front entrance though out the home, each room displays Marie’s decorative tole paintings on glass, metal, and wood while Roger’s pen and ink framed sketches are displayed across shelves, the mantel and on walls.

Different style and techniques reflect the wife’s and husband’s artistic individuality: decorative painting for Marie and pin and ink for Roger.

Marie probably has more pieces on display in their home, yet she said. “I really don’t have a favorite. I enjoy painting everything,” Marie confesses with a smile. “I like painting Christmas ornaments, the snowmen and especially Santa.” She shows off her plethora of Santa designs, patterns and finished pieces.

“I have given away all of my Christmas ornaments to neighbors as gifts and a few sold at the Farmer’s Market downtown.”

“It is still fun. It is how I relax, my stress reliever,” she admits. Marie is the only Palisade member of the Grand Junction chapter of Western Colorado Decorative Artists, but she wants to learn more and go to National seminars in Ohio or Las Vegas, which she has heard about but never attended.

Her chapter hosted a two-day seminar at First Congressional Church in Grand Junction last weekend, April 4-5 and sponsored well-known National Certified Decorative Artist Karen Hubbard from Oregon to teach two complicated techniques that she had created.

“It was fantastic to meet Karen and follow her lessons. In one afternoon we completed a Goldfinch, and on Saturday we painted a bear cub surrounded by Columbines, the State flower. I am still working on that pattern,” She showed off both pieces on her work desk, along with several other paintings in various stages of completion.

Marie learned decorative tole painting in 1995. “We were living in Denver, and our Minister’s wife Julie invited me over one afternoon to see what she does.  When I saw her art, I wanted to learn how to do that. We went to classes at night. That’s how I learned to paint.”

Eighteen years later she is honing her skills, but if any one praises her talent, she is quick to say, “My husband Roger is an artist too.

“He does the pen and ink drawings hanging there. He has always been behind me. He gives me critiques. Tells when I do it good, and tells me when I don’t. Helps me out too.

Both of them are “in-house critics for each other.”

Marie follows a pattern, yet she stylizes through the acrylic colors and brush strokes. She continues to take classes and challenges herself to try more complicated techniques.

Roger paints free hand about objects, animals and places he has seen.  His primary subjects are drawn in pen-and-ink: wild game and mountain landscapes familiar and meaningful to him and his family. He never took any classes in drawing; he learned by practicing sketching his favorite subjects.

The Granat family are hunters and campers for generations in the mountains they love. His drawings of buffalo, elk, mountain goats are finely detailed noble replicas of the animals both Marie and Roger have seen and harvested together.

He admits he was in the 6^th grade when “I took six classes from Mrs. Capp, a professional oil painter up on East Orchard Mesa.  Roger proudly points out the one landscape in oil that he painted of his grandfather’s favorite spot.

“My folks started me on them. Then we got busy working in the orchards in the Vine lands.”  

This couple has been friends since childhood. Their parents were neighboring orchard growers in the Vineland, so the kids grew up almost like siblings, playing, camping and going through everything together.  “I treated Marie and her sister like they were my own sisters,” Roger Granat said with a smile as he described how he knew his wife as a child.

Born and raised in Palisade, both went to Palisade High School. But after graduating, they went in different directions. Roger in 1960 stayed in the Vine lands where he bought an orchard before he was 17.  Marie graduated in 1966 and moved to Denver, just because “I wanted to live in the big city,” she said.

Both had married others and divorced, but Marie came back to her hometown for a visit and reconnected with Roger when both families were rebuilding a neighbor friend’s barn.

They married and lived in Denver for eight years until 2002, when they moved back to be close to family. In 1986 Roger said he won with his entry in Palisade Art League’s contest. In 1989 he sold his first pen-and ink of a deer head to a friend.

The next year he just stopped—“no drawing, no painting, nothing.  Started back in 2011, because I need something to do.”

Maybe he got back in the artistic mood because he became Mayor of Palisade in 2010. Maybe because he and Marie are retired, and have the time to enjoy doing what they want to do, Maybe it is because Roger has to stay busy.

Whatever the reason Roger Granat is back in the artistic mood.

“I do it just to relax. I’ll see something when we are out hunting or camping, I snap a photograph of something, come home sketch it out.

“It is a challenge just to see if I can.”

Like his wife, his is talent is evident. Both use their art talent “to relax,” and “to see if I can do it.”

Few people will see all the art that husband and wife have or will produce.

They don’t promote their talent for the money or livelihood. They do it to relax, enjoyment and the challenge of doing something new the best way they can.

Freelance writer Brenda Evers can be reached at brendabevers@hotmail.com

1050 words

Palisade Person Mae Ryan loves family, friends & memories

           Mae Ryan is finally getting out of her house and back around town. The cold weather, snow and health issues have kept this octogenarian homebound from her regular visits around town during the first months of this year.

            This 15-year resident of Palisade loves getting out to see her family and friends, but most of all she loves to talk, to tease and to be independent in so many ways.

            “I’m still able to drive myself. In Palisade. I don’t want to, and my son does not want me to drive in Grand Junction,” she admits.  So instead of staying home doing nothing, Mae is starting a new project

She read about Lisa’s Scrapbooking Boutique opening on Main Street, and here she is, getting her granddaughter Rachel’s school photos and mementoes organized and arranged in a scrapbook before May.

            “She is graduating from Doane College in Nebraska,” Mae said proudly. “I’ve never been to Nebraska, so I don’t know where her college is located. But I want to get this done before she comes home.

            “I love to decorate and do stuff like this, but this may be too much for me, so Lisa said she would help.”
            “Of course I will help,” Lisa Horn says as she separates Mae’s pile of pictures and paper notes, cards, and child-like drawings, the sweet misspelled, crooked pieces of love messages from a youngster to her adoring grandparent.

            Their concentration on sorting everything by date is interrupted by happy voices of more customers coming into the shop. Lisa greets her friends by introducing, “Hi, you all, this is Mae. Everybody knows Mae.”

Lisa introduced her neighbor Kristin Turner and her mother Virginia Johnson who came to the boutique to pick out paper for Kristin’s next project.

Eighty-four year old Mae is not shy about meeting and greeting new friends. She will talk to anyone, anytime, any place she meets people, but she has to be talked into telling anything about herself.

She does not divulge details about her 84 years of life freely, until she feels that she is among friends.

 “I was born in Colorado Springs. When I was a senior in high school with one month before graduation, my dad moved us to Leadville. I had to graduate after being there only one month.” She remembers that well, but she married a young man who was born in Leadville and had two sons before the family lived in Lakewood until her husband died.

Kristin and Virginia exclaimed that they too had lived in Lakewood, so they chatted on about familiar places and changes since Mae lived there. Now that she had new friends, Mae told more about her life.

She buried him in Leadville and would go back to visit his grave and decided to stay.” When her sons were grown, she bought an old Victorian home and remodeled it by herself, or as she said, “I paid for everything to be done, and it was in the Historical home tours.”

Mae enjoyed the independence in Leadville, her friends, jobs in the stores and the house. She “loved it there,” but she moved on to Palisade because her family needed her.

“I came here to babysit my granddaughter,” she explained her move, but ironically she continued making new friends, taking care her granddaughter over the years, and decorating her houses.

            Since her arrival in the Valley she has moved and fixed up three different homes. She lived in a small mobile home, to a double wide, and now in a three room building that her family and friends calls “the Quilt house” because it was the former Quilt fabric store. Mae feels too old to fix up another house and has no intention to move again.

            Her best Palisade friends Nancy and Tom Kessenich probably know Mae better than any one else, except Melinda Eastland who owns Mumzul’s Crumpets, Tea and Cones Shop on Main Street.

According to Nancy, their friendship began when Mae Ryan first moved into town. “We were working in Melinda’s antique store on the corner. Melinda added a coffee shop up front.  Mae likes antiques so she came in, started talking, and instant friends.”

Their talking, teasing and laughter continued when Melinda closed her store and opened the Mumzul’s shop behind the store that is now The Blue Pig. That’s where Lisa Horn met Mae.

“Everyone knows Mae. She is such a fun person.

“Each time she enters Mumzel’s, Tom breaks out in song,

Hello, My Honey. Hello, my baby. Hello, my ragtime gal . . .”

This makes Mae light up in smiles and start talking and teasing to any one and every one in her friend’s teashop.”

The Kesslenichs had many stories of Mae’s wit and camaraderie.

 “A few years ago, a bear came down the Mesa and climbed up one of her trees,” Nancy recalled Mae version, “He had a plastic bag stuck on his claw, and Mae called and said, ‘I didn’t know how that white bag was going up that tree,’ then she saw it was a bear.”

“She asked me if she should lock her door. I told her, ‘I don’t think he is going to knock.” Tom replied.  They have laughed many times over that story.

            “Mae is not a talker-talker,” Tom said, and then explained, “She talks a lot, but doesn’t reveal a lot about herself.”

            That’s part of the independent nature of Mae Ryan.

            “I talk more than my son, but we are private people.” She keeps repeating, but she will tease you, give you advice, joke with you, make you laugh, and keep saying, “This is just between you and me.”

            When her new friends left, Mae and Lisa went back to her granddaughter’s childhood photos, but this 84-year-old mused, “Lisa’s shop is so cute. It is clever, and she has done such a nice job.

            “Palisade, it’s a wonderful, quiet small town. We need more businesses. We don’t have much going on, and because we have so little I would like people to go to our places.  If we don’t, and we take everything to Grand Junction, we’ll never grow.”

But that was enough to talk about: the town, the shop, her project. She looks up with a smile. “What are you scribbling down? Don’t write about me. Remember this is just between you and me.”

Her personal life—those stories--her friends have to learn in bits and pieces from her actions and what other friends tell about her. 

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