A painter’s perspective

WASILLA — If there’s one thing Claire Barton was passionate about, her husband said, it was creating art, and recording it.

“She was adamant about taking pictures of everything she ever did,” Bob Barton said, leafing through photos of his wife’s artwork.

Before she passed away at age 71 in October of 2010, Claire Barton was a prolific painter, cake maker and an accomplished harpist. She won numerous awards at the Alaska State Fair and Fur Rendezvous for her elaborate edible creations, and gifted many Christian paintings to churches in Southcentral Alaska and Palm Beach, Florida, where she and Bob used to live.

She also liked to paint gold pans, one of which she adorned with a Palmer landscape she saw shortly after they first moved to Alaska in 1977.

“It’s certainly grown up now, with that senior center and whatever, but this is what it looked like back then,” Bob said, looking at the Chugach Street scene.

Though Claire didn’t specialize in historic pieces, her eye for preserving the past for the future is clear in her work. Her 2003 acrylic painting of the World Trade Center’s twin towers rising out of the Sept. 11 destruction is one example of her desire to remember what is now part of the nation’s history.

Bob said he “didn’t remember much” about the event, aside from watching Flights 77 and 175 crash into the towers on television. Later, he would want to visit the crash site and memorial of Flight 93 — bound for the White House and derailed by passengers who overpowered the hijackers — but never got around to making the trip.

“It was so far away, I didn’t think much about it,” he said of the attack.

Claire, on the other hand, was always thinking about things that might affect or mean something to her family later in life, it seems. She often nagged Bob to turn the handwritten stories of his 15 years in Florida law enforcement into a book, and finally did it for him — and their three kids — in 2009, as a Christmas present.

“It was really a surprise,” Bob said.

The children, Heidi, Wendy and Chris were still in school when Bob first started writing about his experiences, but Claire was thinking ahead — not only about preserving her husband’s life for her kids beyond his passing, but about the kind of people they would become.

The Barton’s oldest daughter, Heidi Gardipee, said that she and her siblings are all creative or artistic in some way, but that her mother gifted her something special.

“When I was in junior high school, she laid hands on me and prayed that the Lord would bless the work of my hands like he did hers, and I think he did,” Gardipee said, now an award-winning painter herself. “It’s quite a legacy for her to have passed along to me.”

Claire’s 9/11 painting will be on display at Gardipee’s business, Aurora Flowers, for the month of September, in recognition of the 15-year-old tragedy.

“We wanna make sure that everybody gets that we remember,” Gardipee said.

Aurora Flowers is located at 3161 E. Palmer-Wasilla Hwy. #5 in Wasilla.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.