Backdrop painter tackles major project for ‘Oz’

WASILLA - A giant canvas occupies an entire wall of a small warehouse just up the road from Sears.

Sewn together from lesser canvases, it features a life-size scene of a dense, dark forest.

"That's what I'm really trying to do is make it look like you can walk into the background," said Dawn Alger, the artist who painted the scene.

Rolled up against one wall is another canvas. There's a third and a fourth canvas already done and she's planning what will go on the fifth.

And all of them will soon be on display in Valley Performing Arts' production of "The Wizard of Oz," set to open March 23. The forest will double as the scene of the group's meeting with the Cowardly Lion and a scene featuring the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys.

Alger's also painted a sepia-toned Kansas farm backdrop for all the pre-tornado scenes, the interior of the Emerald City and a blue-sky, wide-open landscape to use in various spots, especially when Dorothy and her pals make it out of the forest. Still to go is Munchkinland, which Alger will paint on the back wall of the theater. She said it's probably going to be the most detailed of the backdrops and she's hoping to get some help for it.

"The wood scene I really procrastinated on ... because I've never painted any woods," Alger said, adding that a gigantic blank canvas is a very intimidating thing.

But she's not new to painting backdrops - she's done at least a dozen of them, including productions of "It's a Wonderful Life," "Scrooge," "Nunsense II," "Sound of Music" and "Beauty and the Beast."

That last one is a story in and of itself. Alger said she had initially declined VPA's request for her to paint the "Beauty and the Beast" backdrop. She was planning to be out of town, seeing her oldest son off to Spain.

When she got back from New York, she said, the director called her up, unhappy with the backdrop he had. Alger said she took some time to think about it and finally relented.

"I did a whole new mock-up," she said. "I had seven days to get it done."

But she was happy with the way it turned out.

This hobby of painting giant works more-or-less started for Alger with "Scrooge." She played the Ghost of Christmas Past in that production and was late to rehearsal one night. Before she showed up, the director asked if anyone knew a good artist to help out on backdrops.

"A friend of mine said, ‘Oh, Dawn's a great artist,'" Alger said.

And that, as they say, was that. Alger said she minored in art at college, but is more-or-less self-taught in backdrop painting.

"What you tend to worry about in smaller works, the detail, you just don't even see," she said of the audience's perception of her work.

Alger's day job is in health care, which is why her work is also on display in murals on the walls of the children's infusion ward at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. She's painted sled dogs and puffins, Bush planes and polar bears for that ward. She did the work at night so each new animal painted was a surprise to the staff and the patients.

Like a lot of talented local folks with a proven track record, Alger said she gets more offers to do VPA work than she accepts. Even so, she probably accepts more than she should.

"I have problems saying no," she said.

And five backdrops is the largest project she's ever undertaken. She joked that once Dorothy and the Tin Man take their final bows, she's going underground, de-listing her phone number.

"I'm going to take a hiatus after this," she said.

Her warehouse studio is close to a private school, Alger said, and she had a group in to talk about mural painting and taking risks with art. She said she'd like to do more of that, maybe take her mural-painting skills into local schools and teach the kids how it's done.

Some of those kids she's already met with might help her paint Munchkinland. So far she's been a one-woman show. Well, not quite. Her husband helps out here and there, she said.

"He takes direction for painting very well," she said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at Andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.