Three South Dakota artists will have their work featured during an art show beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, prior to the Spirit of Dakota banquet at the Huron Event Center.

The artwork of Julie Waldner, Marian Sprecher and Douglas Bunn will be on display, and the artists will be on hand to visit with the public.

Bunn, is 97 and and has been living in the nursing home in Miller for the past eight years. His daughter, Jackie Holtz, will be bringing his artwork to the show and be on hand to visit with people.

“God bless him, he’s still doing charcoal,” Holtz said of her father. “He can’t do oils anymore, but he’s still doodling and keeping busy. This has been his life.”

Her favorite work of her father’s is an oil painting he created of Sitting Bull. Bunn was commissioned in the late 1980s to do caricatures and charcoals for the original Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood and Pasadena. Many of his works are still hanging in the restaurant to this day.

Bunn began taking commissions for oil portraits and landscapes after retiring from his graphic design commercial art career, including 50 years of teaching art.

His strongest philosophy in portrait painting is, “Be sure that it’s a painting, not a photograph — leaving something to the imagination,” he is quoted as saying.

Julie Waldner, who lives in Iroquois with her husband, Rudy, has been painting since she was a child growing up on the colony with her family. She recently opened her own studio, Dakota Reflections Art Studio, in the basement of their home.

Waldner is a self-taught artist, although she enjoys listening to other artists and learning new techniques.

“When I first started as a child I had a few paint-by-numbers, but it wasn’t enough,” Waldner said. “I used house paints and dyes and mixed my own paints.”

Waldner usually takes a picture of the scene she wants to paint and works from that.

“I love to paint what’s there, for instance, an abandoned truck or a barn,” she said. “I try to find the history of the place or the house, and I meet the people.

“I painted an old Victorian-style house abandoned in the middle of nowhere I found on the way to Mitchell,” she said. “I hunted down the people that used to live there — two ladies. It was the greatest thrill ever to have them come over and look at the painting. The memories they shared of their home. Their grandfather built it and 11 children lived there. It was abandoned in the 1950s.

“My heart and passion is painting rural South Dakota, the forgotten South Dakota,” Waldner added. “Just driving around and finding them. It’s an amazing thing to see how they’re standing out there on the prairie. It makes a beautiful setting.”

Marian Sprecher, a native of Wolsey, is an accomplished watercolor artists who captures the character of her subject with the use of soft color and light.

Sprecher credits her artistic side to her maternal grandfather who was an artist and inventor. As a self-taught artist, Sprecher has attended many watercolor workshops with nationally known artists. She also took art classes at Augustana College in Sioux Falls.

In 2007, Sprecher’s life changed when she had an aneurysm which caused a stroke on her left side.
She gives the Lord all the credit for sparing her life and enabling her to continue in her artistic endeavors. She will also be featured in a solo art show in Wein Gallery in 2022.

When she was still in physical therapy following her stroke, Sprecher created a bucket list goal to paint each grandchild. At that time, there were only five, and to date she and her husband of 50 years, Steve, have nine grandchildren. She accomplished her goal of painting each of them during the pandemic in 2020.

Sprecher’s paintings come from her everyday world, such as the prairies, landscapes, homes, farms, barns, farm animals and flowers.

With each painting, Sprecher said her desire is to use watercolor to express “God’s gifts in nature with images of design and color.”