The Artwork of Ella Porter
Honoring Grandma Ella for the 2011 Garfield County Fair
Looking around Ella Porter’s art room, one is reminded of her great artistic talent and creative spirit. Many of her works proudly hang from the walls, but one in particular catches my eye. The work was created using sepia-toned watercolors on a white canvas. This painting depicts a dirt path winding towards the front porch of a country home. Two great trees provide shade while three black birds fly overhead. The subject matter in the painting, like many of Grandma Ella’s works, illustrate landscapes and subjects (such as barns, wheat fields, old farm equipment, and people who worked the land) associated with country living. It reflects her roots in Garfield County and the life she fondly lived.
Ella Bartels was born on May 29, 1919, to Lily and Harry Bartels of Garfield County, Washington. She was one of five children. The Bartels family made their home in a ranch just south of town in the Dutch Flat area. Like many country kids of the time, she attended grade school at a rural schoolhouse near their home then transferred to Pomeroy High School after eighth grade. After graduation, Ella pursued further education as a beauty operator in Spokane, Washington. In 1941, Ella married Loren Porter (also of Pomeroy). The first three years of their marriage was spent working at a shipyard in Vancouver, Washington. She worked on sheet metal, while he worked in materials handling. It was in this city that their son, Doug, was born. Loren and Ella would move back to Pomeroy that same year to establish a permanent home. Three years later, their daughter, Ginger, was born.
Although Grandma Ella’s roots lay in the golden seas of wheat surrounding Pomeroy, her adventurous spirit took her beyond the bounds of our small town. This is evident in the varied subjects represented in her works. There is the oil-on-canvas seascape depicting waves rolling onto a sandy beach as three seagulls hover above. Another illustrates a small creek winding through a mountainous landscape during the changing colors of fall. Her travels- whether it be to the coast or the mountains, her vacations to the Pacific (Guam, Hawai’i, Cayman and Micronesian Islands), or her yearly trip to Arizona with her sister, Julia- and her illustrations of what she experienced were not the only representations of her will-do spirit.
This sense of adventure is also evident in the various mediums she utilized in her works. A three-dimensional sculpture of an owl lies in our kitchen. A closer look at the work reveals that it is completely made of dried flowers. A detailed look at a favorite Christmas ornament, Santa Clause, reveals that his rounded stomach was created using folded pages taken from the Readers Digest. She once sculpted a fish from a block of ice and used it as a centerpiece for a punchbowl. She, along with her sister, Julia, tried everything at least once.
This spirit of exploration equally matched her ability to see beauty in the small things in life. Many of her still-life portraits portray a simple flower in a vase or fruit in a bowl. Even with such humble subjects, she utilized her artistic skills to illustrate the inherent beauty of everything.
The willingness to try new things, the ability to recall the beauty of the world, and the skill to illustrate that beauty could only match her desire to share her knowledge of art with others. Nothing would make her happier than for people to look at her work, learn from it, and take that knowledge to create their own works of art. In this spirit, Ella Porter’s family would like to share some of her works with you during this year’s county fair.