Drifting Into Watercolor

Cloquet's Lyn Jutila is currently exhibiting her watercolors at the Pine Knot office. She recently sat down with us to talk about her work and how she became a watercolorist after hanging her paintings on the multi-colored brick wall that is The Knot art gallery.

"I moved here from California. I'd always enjoyed painting on boards, on driftwood. I began painting in oils, but enjoyed viewing watercolors and dabbling with them, taking classes now and then."

A stay-at-home mom, her children thought they could help! She still has a painting with their contributions. "I started painting when we started our family. My husband, Bruce, was in the Air Force, stationed in Duluth. We married in 1968 in Cloquet. The day of our wedding, he was assigned a mission overseas. I didn't want to live by myself in Duluth, so I moved back home to live with my parents and worked at the Johnson Company department store."

After Bruce returned from being stationed in Thailand, they moved to California, to his last station at San Bernardino Air Force Base.

"We wanted to move back to Minnesota. Bruce got a job with Best Oil and went to UMD. We decided to live in Cloquet, out by Big Lake. Before starting our family, we built a house, and, later, another one."

Lyn originally painted in oils. But she began to prefer watercolors. "It's the movement, the flow of water, " she reflects. "And oils take so long to dry."

She took painting lessons in Cloquet in an open air park where City Hall is now located. She met other watercolorists, with whom she formed a group that met and painted together in the park. One year they held an art fair.

Lyn also began to exhibit at the Park Point Art Fair. She enjoyed meeting other artists there, especially Marsha Boeker who made silk scarves. "Most artists are willing to share!" She took a class up the North Shore with Russell Norberg, whose watercolors she admired. She befriended other artists, including Joyce Gow of Two Harbors. Betty Brown invited her to the Lake Superior Watercolor Society some 20 years ago. She's still a part of it, though currently their 35 members meet by Zoom. She participates in the Arrowhead Regional Artists group as well.

What does she see as her strengths, special techniques?

"I'm not a loose painter," Jutila said. "I have a vision in my mind, and then I have to paint it before it's gone. If I don't do it right away, it's lost. Sometimes it disappoints me, but sometimes it's better than I thought."

When Lyn paints on canvas, she preps the canvas to accept the watercolor paint with something called ground base, which "looks like Elmer's glue," brushing it on with a large paint brush. "Sometimes I have to apply layers of my colors. I work from the top down. Sometimes, I can tilt the canvas and the paint will roll!"

Lyn and Bruce raised three children. She began to teach watercolors, through community ed and workshops at the library, mostly locally. She held some parent-child classes, teaching adults what they needed to do and how to work with their children. "I taught everyone from a 70-year-old grandpa to a 3-year- old." She taught an adult class one year at the Pine Valley chalet. She currently serves on the new art board at the Cloquet Public Library.