Mary Talbert: Centenarian artist shatters age myths

On  the morning of her 100th birthday, January 17, 2024, the eminent Arkansas artist Mary Louise Talbert awoke in her small wooden house in West Fork. She began to paint – as she has done countless times in eight decades as a working artist. 

Talbert also rested in anticipation of what she knew would be a busy year ahead. The next evening, more than 250 friends and patrons honored her at a 100th birthday celebration. The fete was part of the group exhibition “The Golden Creatives” at The Medium in Springdale.

More accolades followed. On August 15, Talbert’s one-woman exhibition opened at the Apollo on Emma in Springdale. A solo show was an achievement that she had long worked toward. And on October 13, a documentary film about her life, “The Timeless Canvas: A Century of Mary Talbert,” debuted at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Public recognition of Talbert’s painting eluded her in earlier years, but was abundant in 2024.  “It’s hard to believe this is happening,” she said. “I’m thankful, but overwhelmed. My life’s work has been validated.”

AN AMERICAN LIFE

Mary Louise Rau was born in Topeka, Kansas, on January 17, 1924 – halfway between World War I and the Great Depression. She grew up in Atchison, Kansas with two brothers, the daughter of railroad man Frederick John Rau and his wife Pansy, a homemaker. 

Mary wanted to be an artist from an early age. “I couldn’t wait for the first day of school because I heard that every pupil would receive a watercolor set,” she said.

After graduating from Atchison High School, she couldn’t afford art college. She moved to Kansas City and landed a job folding paper at the Hallmark Cards company in 1942, when it was still named Hall Brothers.

Mary kept asking her bosses for illustration work. She finally got her wish when the company licensed the Bambi character from the Walt Disney Company for a line of greeting cards. Disney sent some celluloid transparencies for reference. In the early days of animation, these “cels” were the Disney drawings for individual frames of motion cartoons.  

For the greeting cards, the animals were required to be close copies of the Disney figures, but Mary was free to add scenery such as forests, rocks and ponds. She drew the nature scenes in several layers for color-separation plates.

From then on, Mary was a professional artist with a career spanning 80 years in commercial and fine arts. She worked at Hallmark for two more years, contributing to projects like framed samplers with positive messages.  

In 1944, Mary left Hallmark to marry Joe Bruce Talbert from Colorado. She took his last name, and they had three children: John, Gerald and Linda. During this period, she concentrated on raising her family. 

However, she still painted for pleasure and earned a little money drawing pictures of peoples’ pets. She also contributed to a public-art project in Atchison, which had been decimated by a flood. Artists painted pictures on boarded-up store windows to beautify the downtown. 

Talbert and her family struggled financially in Kansas. In the early 1970s, they  relocated to Northwest Arkansas where her husband’s family owned land. They tried farming but found it difficult, and their finances didn’t improve much.

Talbert continued to paint in Arkansas. Her paintings sold well at craft shows, but were usually rejected for juried competitions. For a time, she and her husband Joe made large-scale glass etchings, framed and lighted, for sale to institutions like hospitals. They used the proceeds to buy land. 

Joe died in 2003. Later, in one of life’s bittersweet twists, their daughter Linda, once estranged, reconciled with her mother at the 100th birthday celebration in 2024 –  but died only two weeks later.

Talbert said that one of her early obstacles was a lack of interaction with other artists. Later she received support and companionship from groups like Artists of Northwest Arkansas and Golden Creatives. She still drives her 2009 Chevrolet Impala to the West Fork fire department hall where local artists gather to work and collaborate every week.

 “I always wanted to be good enough at art that someone would buy it,” she said, adding that validation from peers is nearly as fulfilling as selling a piece.

ARTISTIC COMMENTARY

Talbert has worked in watercolor, pastel, pencil, acrylic, etching and photography. Along the way, she completed occasional art classes, including ones with the Pastel Society of America and the University of Arkansas.

“I don’t care for oil paints, because I’m too impatient to wait for the layers to dry,” she said. Nowadays, she favors pastel pencils, believing they give her the most control since the onset of arthritis. 

Among her influences, she lists Monet, the Wyeths, and John Salter, a magazine illustrator from Atchison who specialized in scenes of daily life. Talbert’s strongest work includes acrylic landscapes that employ precise perspective and bold colors. Her hazy impressionist pastels of people playing and working are especially appealing. The accessible style of a former Hallmark illustrator makes the scenes feel instantly familiar.   

Stan Dark, president of Artists of Northwest Arkansas, said: “Mary Talbert is a natural, self-taught artist. Her sunsets, barns, pastures, horses, and florals portray a sense of peace and harmony. She paints in acrylics and seems to know exactly where she is going.”

The perspective of an arts educator was provided by Dr. Evelyn Jorgenson, former president of Northwest Arkansas Community College and Moberly Area Community College. She said:  “Mary Talbert’s impressionistic, yet boldly colorful paintings of people, animals and scenes of everyday life are moving to both the trained and untrained eye.” 

Talbert described her approach this way:  “The essence of a painting is a story – of a person, place or event that gives pleasure like a parade that your grandson was in. It’s not something that might be lost like a snapshot in the Cloud.”

For a centenarian artist, perhaps the remembered images of a long life exist in sort of an internal Cloud, like cascading layers of paint on canvas. 

Carla Nemec contributed to research for this article. 

For more information, see the documentary “The Timeless Canvas: A Century of Mary Talbert” on YouTube. Dennis Figueroa and Craig Pasquinzo directed the 19-minute film for Springdale Public Schools, Don Tyson School of Innovation.