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April 21, 2006 Iowa Celebration Finds Festival Artist in Neighboring Minnesota
Orange City, Iowa
Every
year the Orange City Tulip Festival (May 18, 19 and 20) features a new piece of
artwork by a regional artist. In recent years, original watercolors, oil
paintings, and pen and ink drawings celebrated unique aspects of the community’s
Dutch heritage, with prints available at Festival. For Festival 2006 through
2009 the Art Committee has taken a new direction and launched a series of four
decorative tiles.
The subject of this year’s tile is the Wilhelmina Paardetram,
an old world trolley. Horse-drawn trolleys are a popular attraction at the
Festival, a relaxing way for visitors to tour the town and see the tulips. The
artist commissioned to design and craft the tile is Sheryl VanderPol, founder of
Plymouth, Minnesota-based Untapped Resource, Inc. VanderPol has relatives in the
Orange City area, and she enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to represent
her own Dutch heritage.
Untapped Resource specializes in creating customer-inspired,
hand-painted art murals on tile, glass, porcelain, and natural stone products,
along with Trompe L’oeil, the art of illusion. VanderPol’s goal is to
“tap into each customer’s source of happiness in a visual sense by providing a
unique, original, creative artwork.” (See
www.untappedresource.com)
VanderPol’s marketing statement reads, “Who you are…inspires me…to create for
you.” She believes the statement was never truer than in this Tulip Festival
project and expresses great pleasure in creating this artwork to reflect a Dutch
tradition. The Wilhelmina tile was inspired by photos, sketched for
composition, painted and fired, then repainted and fired five times to add
detail, washes of color, shadow and depth. VanderPol says, “The whole process
involves much time, but the outcome was very strong and dramatic, yet very soft
and serene, much like our heritage’s characteristics.”
VanderPol donated the original 12” by 12” tile to the Tulip
Festival. Numbered and signed 6” x 6” replicas may be purchased at ArtBurst, the
Festival’s juried art competition and sale, on Saturday, May 20, from 10 a.m.
until 4 p.m. on the Sioux County Courthouse lawn and at the Windmill Welcome
Center on Highway 10. The Orange City Tulip Festival is May 18, 19, and 20. For
additional details on the Festival and photos of the tile, see
www.octulipfestival.com.
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Copyright © 2008 Tulip Festival Steering Committee
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