‘Alaska’s favorite artist’ returns to Wasilla Saturday

WASILLA —For 28 years, Janet St. George has owned the Town Square Art Gallery in the Wasilla Shopping Center, and for 25 of them Barbara Lavallee has been the featured artist at least once a year.

It’s always the biggest event of the Town Square calendar.

“I like to call her Alaska’s favorite artist,” St. George said. “She’s so wildly popular and she keeps prices reasonable.”

Lavallee’s paintings and illustrations available in both her prints and in the 16 children’s books she’s illustrated, carry a consistent tone that’s uniquely Alaska, reflecting the joy of its people.

It’s a spark that first went off when she arrived in Alaska in 1970 to teach art at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

“It was my students who inspired me,” Lavallee said. “I just absolutely fell in love with my students. They’re so fascinating and I learned so much from them. They were the ones who were my inspiration.”

That experience morphed Lavallee from a realism artist to a form she describes as a “colorful, bright, fun, energetic style.”

The people in Lavallee’s work share a common delight, and a commonness of appearance, something she came across early in her pursuits.

“I discovered the trick of dividing the faces,” she explained. “I was doing a silkscreen print… and I discovered I could put all of the features into a face and get all the expression without making it into a portraiture. I wanted that universal face look, that profile down the center of the face, making half of it darker.”

On Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m., Lavallee will be at Town Square to show her work and sign it, personally for fans.

“All of her fans, they look forward every year just to wait to talk to Barbara,” St. George said. “She personalizes everything — any little item, she will personalize.”

On Saturday, Lavallee will be coming with her latest print, “Walking with Dogs.”

“She’s got a really nice gallery there, a very loyal group of people,” Lavallee said of St. George. “When I go there people start coming even before I get there… The public is very loyal to its gallery, and they show up.”

St. George can usually can count on more than 100 to pass through her doors on a Lavallee day.

“She paints a lot of the native people of Alaska… She’s got some really great insight into the customs and the people,” St. George said. “She shows in her artwork how happy they are; they rejoice in life — playing, dancing, talking, she depicts Alaska in a very fun and colorful way.”