Lindsborg is well known for being a community that supports the arts. And it’s produced painters like Birger Sandzen and Lester Raymer.
Artist John Whitfield was a friend of Raymer’s, and the Smokey Valley Arts and Folklife center is hosting a retrospective of Whitfield's work.
Torin Andersen talked with gallery curator Marsha Howe and the artist's daughter, Susan Whitfield, to find out more.
Marsha Howe and Susan Whitfield chatter behind the sounds of artist John Whitfield's wind vane. Friends in their own right, they talked of a complex artist with myriad interests.
Howe beckoned me to the backroom of the gallery. She shows me a three-piece wind vane that John Whitfield designed for the safety center of Lindsborg.
“Of course, they dropped it and it broke, but it's got these three ships, the fire, the police and the ambulance,” Howe said.
“So we're trying to figure out how to get it fixed. But isn't that gorgeous?”
Looking at a wood carving that her father sculpted, Susan called the expression “curious.”
“Well, this is a carving of an angel, has gray wings, It's about 30 inches tall,” she said. “The eyes are not seeing eyes; they are clear glass, and it is as though they follow you around the room.”
The angel was created later in John Whitfield's life after health issues mounted, preventing him from working as much as he wanted.
“This is from a time when he was doing wood carving because he couldn't work with metal anymore,” Susan said.
Susan now manages her father’s estate. She said his life of creative work was “quite prolific.”
“From the beginning, a lot of churches have his altar pieces and Paschal candles and Stations of the Cross and baptismal fonts.”
John Whitfield was born an English citizen in India. When World War II started, his mother moved them to Lindsborg, where his sister was set to study under famed artist Birger Sandzen. Whitfield stayed a short while before his family moved to Topeka, where he went to high school. He stayed there into adulthood.
“He acquired a studio out in the country, west of Topeka,” Susan said. “...From then on, he was creating a lot more variety. Had several galleries — Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa — representing him. So he produced a lot.”
John Whitfield started producing large public works in his new studio from the 1970s to the early ’80s, but then was forced to take time off because of heart problems.
“Doctors told my mother and myself that they didn't give him five years to live,” Susan said.
John Whitfield brought himself back to strength and back to his creative work. His wind vanes are his most notable work - many of the city's rooftops are festooned with these spinning works of art.
“I don't know how many I'm still counting,” Susan said.
Susan points out that she found an article her father had saved about the history of wind vanes. She thinks he created them for the challenge.
“Every wind vane, especially the large commissioned wind vanes, involved a lot of engineering to make sure it was going to whirl around evenly that it could withstand a lot of wind,” Susan said. “And it gave him a chance to design things that were not necessarily so serious.”
Marsha Howe describes her own Whitfield wind vane.
“We have a wind vane on our garage,” she said. “That's a ... “beneficent,” I think [that’s] the title of it. And it's a dragon, but a good Dragon, John was sure to point out.”
Examples of the wind vanes are featured throughout the exhibit and in Lindsborg. Included with the show is a map of the many public works Whitfield created for the city. These include works along the Valkommen Trail, the hospital and Coronado Heights.
“When we first came up with our exhibition schedule, I wanted to highlight [that] I call them 'the dead guys,’” Howe said. “That may sound irreverent, but then we've always celebrated artists that had an impact on our community and the art scene in Lindsborg.”
John Whitfield passed away in 2011. The retrospective highlights his paintings, carvings and other musings that only a restless, creative mind could conjure. He even once made a bicycle for a parade.
“This thing that he made was the blue buzzard, which was a recumbent bike,” Susan said. “It was blue and had a buzzards head. He peddled that one in the parade one year.”
