The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center is hosting a reception this afternoon from 4-7:00 in honor of a summer-long art show that opened last week featuring the works of the late Marilyn Belschner, a Nebraska native.
Celebrating Color and Light: The Art of Marilyn Belschner includes still life, abstract, portrait, and landscape pastel drawings. It runs through September 6th.
Belschner, the mother of local resident Shawn Cogdill, was born in Beatrice in 1930 and as a child drew and made paper dolls, designing and creating their clothing using wallpaper books and fabric remnants.
She graduated from high school in Kearney in 1945, then married James Belschner in 1949 and moved to Amherst, living there for 35 years and raising her 2 daughters.
As an aspiring artist in the 1950s and 1960s, she experimented in sculpture, illustration, watercolor, acrylic, and oil painting. In 1966, her first oil painting received The Nebraska Centennial Art Show award.
Belschner was passionate about researching her topics and taking photographs she could work from. She became dedicated to developing her talents and settled on pastel as her primary medium.
Influenced by Georgia O’Keefe, among others, she eventually moved to Taos, New Mexico, where O’Keefe received much of her inspiration, allowing Belschner to fulfill her own dream to paint and study the people of the Southwest.
Travels to Europe and Hawaii further broadened her library of work, but she also remained active in her home areas – helping schools with artistic and creative projects throughout her life.
A website has more on the life and work of Marilyn Belschner.