It’s been a long time coming for local artist Marolyn Beck to finally get her work on the walls. The St. Albert Painters’ Guild member admits to normally being reclusive and didn’t even put up any paintings of her own for the guild’s fall show and sale at St. Albert Place last weekend.

It turns out that she might have been saving some of the limelight for her own return to exhibition space. This is her first solo show and the first time she has shown her work publicly in a few years.

“The reason I paint is because I love the process,” she stated. “I don’t much care for all of the other stuff that goes along with it.”

“I just like painting!”

That’s not to say that she hasn’t had her fair share of acclaim. Beck, a former farm girl who learned to appreciate the beauty of the land, as much as its bounty, was still in her early teens when she first took her work to a jury. A pencil crayon work got her first prize with the Edmonton Exhibition Association.

Later, the Alberta Community Art Clubs Association would give her the Jurors’ Choice Award followed by the first ever People’s Choice Award from her showing with one of the St. Albert Painters’ Guild’s semiannual shows.

It’s not that she’s a stranger to the scene, just that she has preferred to gather steam over the last few years. The work on display is a retrospective of her work but she hasn’t really picked up a brush in a few years.

“I’m just trying slowly to get back into it. I took this show at the Bookstore because I thought maybe that would spur me on.”

Her work is a good representation of what must have captivated the interests of the former farm girl: snow covered country lanes, wagons waiting for work amid the growing weeds, and a stone oven in the middle of a field.

In the past, Beck has been shown in several metro Edmonton galleries but it’s been at least two years since the last one. She’s not in it for the accolades or profits, she says. In fact, she has recently made donations of work to Lo-Se-Ca and Art with a Heart, a fundraiser that is hoping to bring a little bit of culture back to the people of Slave Lake who lost so much during the town fire of 2011.

“I’m not really into the money end of things. I just like to do it. If it sells – fine, but that’s certainly not my main objective for doing this … any more.”

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