Artist inspired by her Eskimo roots

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Joanne Swanson first picked up a paintbrush at the age of 41, but she has quickly joined the ranks of accomplished artists who started their careers much younger.

Today her contemporary and traditional paintings depicting village scenes and portraits are included in both private collections and Native-owned corporations and businesses across the north.

Swanson was born at a fish camp in the community of Shaktoolik, which is a coastal village located near the Norton Sound in the Bering Sea in Alaska.

"Our village population was about 120 Inupiaq Eskimo," she said. Although she had no desire to paint as a youngster, her memories of the sunlight playfully peeking from behind the trees and other scenes of the north are never far from her consciousness and appear often in her paintings.

"My inspiration comes from having lived in rural Alaska. My ideas are endless," she said.

An childhood experience told her that she was destined to become an extraordinary person. At the time she didn't know what form that would take.

"I was picking berries one evening when I was seven. I was alone, as my mother and sisters had already left to return to camp," she recalled. Suddenly she had a thought, as if God was speaking to her. She could see herself as someone special.

"Later I realized that I wanted to be a painter."

She graduated from Unalakleet's Covenant High School in 1971, never having taken an art class. She married Lee Eckels, a pilot, and the couple soon became parents to son Jason.

"My husband encouraged me to excel at whatever my interests were at the time, and I gained self-confidence in myself during my marriage," she explained. When he was killed in a plane crash in July 1980, she was shattered.

The couple had planned for her to enter Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage that fall.

"I carried on with my plans, but it was difficult. In 1985, I graduated with a degree in education," she said. "I've always been able to pull myself up by my bootstraps, whether it's a daily thing or something bigger."

In 1990, she married again, to Evangelical Covenant Church of Alaska (ECCAK) minister Chip Swanson, and soon a daughter was born.

"It was about this time that I realized I wanted to paint," she remembered. She spent almost two years reading and studying everything about painting that she could find. Then she bought her first watercolour paints and brushes at a garage sale and tentatively applied what she had learned. She painted her first work, a scene of people outside the church, as a Christmas gift for her husband.

Slowly, her work became known to family and friends and they started asking to buy them.

"I knew then that my time had come, that I was going to become an artist," she said. With her family's encouragement, she began painting in earnest. "Sometimes I'd only paint for 10 minutes, or sometimes a whole morning," she said.

The hardest thing about painting in the far-off reaches of North America is the lack of fellow artists to talk to. "I phone artists around the country for support," she said. As a Native Alaskan expressing herself with watercolours, she feels like she's teetering between two worlds.

"I still have one foot in the umiak, a walrus-hide covered boat," she laughed.

Swanson is a life-long learner who welcomes the challenges which painting presents.

"I've been a reader all my life and taught my children the love of reading. I continually challenge myself to apply what I have read to my painting, and because I love it so, I can get lost in my work," she said.

The artist expresses her culture in her paintings as well. "Whether it's a portrait or a landscape, my subjects reflect my Native culture," she said. "Someday I would like to wear a walrus-tusk designed parka, so I painted an Inupiaq woman wearing one with strings of ivory and Russian trade beads, from a picture I saw." Swanson laughed as she explains that the woman in the picture had messy hair, but she straightned it out when she reproduced it in her painting.

Swanson is excited about a Random House book entitled Contemporary Native American Artists to be published later this year, that will include her biography and some of her work.

"I'm working on the biography right now." As well, a 12-member board at the Sivertson Gallery-Art of the North in Grand Marais, Minnesota is considering work from many artists, including some of her pieces, for an upcoming show, she said, adding that even being amongst the finalists is exciting.

Besides reading and painting, her other interests include sewing, beading, camping, berry picking and occasional travel.