Lucille "Lucky" Standing Guindon

Lucky was eighteen-years-old when she moved with her twenty-year-old husband, Wolf, to a wet green mountaintop (Monteverde) on the continental divide in Costa Rica and began life as a pioneer in a land very different from the cornfields of Iowa where she was born. They raised eight children in this remote environment and for the first thirty years she was a full-time mother, living in relative isolation, having to walk at least a couple of kilometers to meet with her neighbours and the rest of the community.

In 1972, a couple of North American artists, Bill Kucha and Ron Tomlinson, came to Monteverde and started teaching art to the locals. The amount of talent on that mountain was extraordinary. There are now many full-time artists in Monteverde who had their beginnings with these classes. Lucky is one of these. She developed her style of pen-and-ink drawings, detailed, intricate portrayals of the trees, vegetation and forest that surrounded her. "Trees, especially the strangler fig, with its twining sculptures, became my favorite subjects. I call them my meditations, each one taking from 8 to 18 hours or so to complete. This can mean weeks, because one can only work 2 hours each day-- in the same hour each day--sitting in lighting which is ever-changing and dependent on the sun."

As Lucky and Wolf’s son, Tomas, says, “In what each of my brothers and sisters [and mother and father] is doing, there’s art or there’s the woods. The art comes right from nature, from feeling the forest around you. There’s the human need for peace and tranquility, for a spiritual calm that you only get when you’re surrounded by nature.” - Kay Chornook, author of Walking With Wolf

Riverside Miracle - pen and ink

Owned by Emily and Nick Frank, Chicago, IL

Sitting in nature there can be a story that goes with each picture, such as looking down to discover you are covered with army ants or looking up into the startled eyes of a brocket deer which just came around the tree you were leaning against. The name of the picture may reflect the story that goes with it, such as “Riverside Miracle.” The setting of this one is the bank of the Guacimal River in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve from the vantage point of a flat rock in the shallow river. With my boots in the river, umbrella over my head, and plastic bag over my picture to ward off the dripping from the trees, it was rather precarious. I felt relief the last day as I finished putting on the wash. Trying to be careful so as to not to drop my picture into the river, I picked up my bottle of ink wash to put it away and, to my dismay, the cap came off dumping the wash right onto my drawing. My heart sank. I quickly soaked up as much as I could with a Kleenex, shoved the picture into its bag, and trudged the hour homeward feeling very low indeed. Getting there I hardly wanted to look at what had taken hours of work, but to my amazement when I did I saw an improved picture. The wash had darkened the banks where it was needed in order to bring out the upper part. Was I getting a little Divine Help? Hence the name: Riverside Miracle -- Lucky Guindon