For local artist Judy Odell, tracking down her own paintings is like “adopting kids out and then getting them back again.”
“It’s interesting all the connections I’ve made by doing this,” she said about her work with having giclees, or signed and numbered prints on canvas, made of a lifetime of original work.
In order to have a giclee made, Odell, 72, must first locate her original work, get a professional photographer to take a picture of the painting and have an imaging company near her second home in California transpose it onto canvas.
Sometimes her originals — many of which she has a habit of giving to friends — resurface easily.
“Last year a lady called me and said she had one of my paintings and it was of a sunflower,” Odell said. “I couldn’t remember it until I saw it and I started to cry. I felt like an idiot.”
Even without a record of all her impressionistic-style paintings, Odell, said that over the past four years she has been able to find about 28 of her original paintings and have giclees made. A total of 24 giclees debuted at Checkers Gallery in Poulsbo, Wash. from Jan. 2 to March 3. At least one new giclee, will be shown along with her original work at Gallery North Art, 508 Main St. in Edmonds throughout July.
Odell said she’s actively searching for six more original pieces, including one she painted based off of the White House Watergate hearings. Although she said it was sold to a bank in Mercer Island, she lost track of it when the bank changed ownership. She made a sketch to accompany a local newspaper article that was published years ago but the painting did not turn up.
“Somebody has it now and I can’t seem to get it back,” she said.
Other paintings like one displayed at the Edmonds Library since 1989, Odell knows exactly where to find.
“I just had a feeling about it that I wanted to share,” she said, recalling how she walked into the Anderson Center in Edmonds one day and donated the painting entitled, “Beach Shacks.”
“I think it was a very nice tribute to put it (in the library).”
Although giclees of the painting will be available at Gallery North Art, a print will be given away at the close of her show through a drawing. Name cards will be collected in a silver pitcher on display by her painting, “Still Life With Roses,” — a piece included in the 2007 Hospice calendar — until the end of the month.
Odell said she established a living trust of her work so that her family will have the rights to her paintings and be able to make more giclees if she is not able to do so if and when more original paintings are discovered.
“A lot of artists don’t realize that they can do this,” she said. “But artist equity guarantees the artist’s right to any of their paintings no matter when or where they sold it.”
A member of the Red Hat Society herself, Odell’s painting entitled, “Red Hot Mamas” and pictured on postcards announcing her art showing at Gallery North Art, was inspired by three women at a restaurant in Poulsbo, Wash.
“I took a picture of three Red Hat Society ladies hamming it up in the ladies’ room,” she said, adding that one day she would like to have a traveling Red Hat art show.
Although she used some of her own artistic license to change some of the details from the scene that inspired the “Red Hot Mamas” painting, Odell said she’s always asking people to take photographs for her, or she’s snapping them herself. Her paintings depicting seascapes, landscapes and floral designs, are often familiar to people who see them, whether the artwork is based on existing sights or created from her own imagination, she said.
A longtime friend and neighbor while Odell resided in the Richmond Beach area, Beverly Meln, owns one of Odell’s first paintings.
“It was of a family home in Kingston,” Meln said. “Like the beach shacks.”
A painter herself, Meln said she has snapped a few photos for Odell’s work.
They are travel companions, she added, as she helped Odell set up for her show in the Gallery North Art loft during the afternoon of July 1.
“It’s what friends do for one another,” she said.
Although Odell said she will eventually stop making giclees, she does not have any plans to stop painting.
“Artists never retire,” she said. “There’s just so much to paint.”
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