3/22/2010
By GORDON D. FIEDLER JR. Salina Journal
One doesn't have to admire for long the watercolors of Paul Sommers to know from where the local artist came.

His detailed bucolic scenes of farms, barns, country churches, wildlife and other outdoor subjects speak of an intimate knowledge of rural life.

However, how he got to the easel is a bit more complicated.

Sommers, a retired schoolteacher and counselor, said he sketched and doodled as a child but never received any early training or guidance during his years growing up in the southeast Kansas town of Potwin.

"It was a real small school," Sommers said. "It didn't have art."

After an artless high school, he went to Emporia State University to earn a teaching degree.

"I had several teachers I thought the world of," Sommers said of his career inspiration. He also had cousins who were teachers.

Still, after a few semesters, he wanted to quit and told his mother. Rather than argue, she figured he just needed a reality check and, with the help of an older brother, landed Sommers a job cleaning the interior of oil tanks.

"It was hot, even in winter. There was no air," Sommers recalled. "After that, college looked pretty darn good. Mom knew what she was doing."

So back to class he went, earned an education degree with emphasis in speech, drama and debate and a minor in psychology.

One of his electives was an appreciation of art course, which did little to stimulate his latent talent.

He taught first at Sterling High School, taking the debate squad to state two of his five years.

He left there and was a counselor at St. John's Military School from 1969 to 1979. He sold real estate for a year before being lured back to teaching, this time at Salina Central High School. A year later, a counseling job opened at Salina South Middle School. Sommers took it and stayed for 21 years, retiring in 2002.

In 2001, he was encouraged by his wife, Ann, to take an art class from local art teacher Bill Hottman. She was in one of Hottman's classes and knew how well her husband could paint.

"Everything just opened up," Sommers said of Hottman's watercolor class.

With retirement looming, he recalled what he used to tell his students on the eve of summer vacations.

"Have a good time, enjoy yourself," he said. "If you get bored, nobody can help you but yourself. Get involved in some activity you enjoy."

Among his suggestions: "Lose yourself in a book."

Sommers decided to "get lost" himself, but in art.

For him, it wasn't a difficult trip: "Good brushes, watercolor paint, paper, and you're all set," he said.

Sommers' escape is a basement room in his east Salina home, where a table holds his supplies and 11-x-14-inch watercolor paper taped in place.

He's tried other media -- oils and acrylics

"I hated to wait for the paint to dry. I felt limited," he said of the oils.

So he stuck with watercolor. "It's unforgiving, but I learned a few tricks," he said.

His paintings are for sale at the Old Grind in Lindsborg. A few also are on sale at St. John's Military School. He's also working on a deal to distribute his work in Denver.

Not that he personally needed it, but validation came when Hoard's Dairyman magazine bought one of his paintings to put on its December 2009 cover.

The picture is of the Falun/Salemsborg Lutheran Church, located south of Smolan, which he titled "Lighthouse on the Prairie." The magazine publisher, Steven Larson, saw a print of the work in Lindsborg. It was his boyhood church, and he bought the original.

A copy hangs in Sommers' basement studio, where he may spend up to eight hours or more lost in a painting.

"I have never taken drugs," he said, "but I have gotten the highest high doing this."

nGordon D. Fiedler Jr. can be reached at 822-1407 or by e-mail at gfiedler@salina.com.

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