Pegasus Home Page

Current Show

Featured Artists

Classes at Pegasus

Our History

Upcoming Events

 Books for Sale

Catalog Index

Contact Pegasus Owner

Dorothy Johnson Wrentmore Rinne

She Had to Be an Artist
by Eva Poole-Gilson

           The first time I saw Dorothy Rinne was about four years ago. You couldn’t miss her even though there were tens of others at the party. It was an art reception at the old Pegasus Gallery building on South Street in Bishop.

            Dorothy was elegantly alone, dressed to the nines, complete with white gloves. She was petite, thin, frail, gracious and lovely—yes, you could tell all that if you looked at her as thoughtfully as she looked at the artwork, her long face tipped slightly to one side, pure white hair a halo. She walked carefully from painting to painting, stopping in front of each one, taking a thoughtful amount of time to enjoy—and assess.

            Yes, you could tell that too: she just had the air of someone who’d earned the right to judge, who’d paid her dues, who’d spent years studying portraits and landscapes and still lifes and photographs and sculpture.

            She had to be an artist.

            “Would you care for a drink and some hors-d’oeuvres?” I asked, having made my way quietly to her side.

            “Why, thank you, Dear. Yes. Yes.”

            So I fixed her up a fine goblet and a little plate of goodies, and joined her on her tour.

            “You must be the person who brought this fine gallery to Bishop,” she said, and smiled so the light radiated from her bright green eyes.

            I nodded.

            “I’m so glad to see what you’re doing here.”

            “I try to feature one or two artists every month or two,” I explained. “Tell me: are you an artist?”

            “How did you ever guess?” She grinned again, royally. “I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a girl back in Woodbine, Iowa. A few years.” She laughed lightly.

“A few years”?—seventy?…

            She just happened to have a few photos of her work in her “evening bag,” mostly pieces she had sold in numerous Western exhibits over the years. After appreciating the Pegasus show and chatting with the featured artists, she and I found comfortable chairs where I could peruse the portable “folio” of her work. (A few news clipping about her and art prizes she’d won also just happened to be stashed amid the photos.)

“Is this a good sampling of your work?” I asked.

            “O, Dear, no, not really,” she answered, an impish glint in her eyes. “You could come to my home, and look.”

            We made an appointment for the following weekend.

“It’s past my bedtime,” she announced, pleased.

            I walked with her to the front door, thinking she lived close. But when I pushed the door open, I had a split second of panic: we’d talked so long it was pitch back outside. “I’ll walk with you,” I said.

            “Oh no, Dear. My car’s just half a block off. I’m fine, just fine.”

            She insisted on marching off on her own. I watched her white halo, her white gloves, become smaller, then indistinguishable as she moved carefully into the deep darkness.

            My God, I thought, there is a lady with amazing spirit, and nerve. I was anxious to see if her artwork would reflect her determination, her health, and her…well, wisdom: the wide, penetrating vision of a lifetime. (She’d confessed to me, in a whisper, that she was 91!)

            It was well over 100 degrees outside the day my two friends and I arrived at Dorothy’s for an extensive look. She greeted us outside at the gate of the little fence encircling her patio. “Hello, hello!” She sashayed past us—yes, she could indeed still sashay!—and opened the door of the rather large, well-built shed behind us. “I arranged things on the shelves as best I could,” she explained. “And I put the ones I think would be good for the show just inside to the right.” She smiled with satisfaction, as if everything was decided (which it wasn’t). “You can bring things out onto the lawn for a better look. I framed the best ones, for the show.”

            She had, too. I guess framing for a veteran artist is like riding a bike: you might teeter, but you never completely forget how to do it….

            Since it was even hotter in the shed, David and Dianne and I did take most everything out onto the lawn: sketchbooks and charcoal studies, oils, pastels, acrylics, prints, pencil and ink drawings, wood cuts and lithographs. We found artwork in the myriad of media you might try in seven or eight decades if you were highly creative and if you really wanted to experience it all in order to decipher your own best medium, and your own “voice” as a unique visual artist. There were studies in realism, impressionism, cubism—in the carefully exact, the abstract, and the geometric. There were florals and portraits, landscapes and still lifes. There were certain paintings on philosophical themes—which were meant to push the viewer to think. I imagined these were based on the personal emotions and experiences with which Dorothy’d become extra familiar over the many years, the emotions and experiences perhaps most baffling to her. One especially interesting one of those was called “Youth.” A young man gazed boldly into your eyes, but behind him and to all sides were other versions of his face and eyes, all slightly different, of slightly more timid mood—perhaps many of the “masks” he had worn….

            But most original and best of all—best of the treasure trove, I thought—were Dorothy’s portraits, especially those of Native Americans. The ones I liked the best—and those I later quickly sold at her one-woman show (oh yes, we set the date for her show on that first visit to her home)—the ones I marveled over were vibrant pastels, about 18 by 24 inches, each one. In the early 1950’s Dorothy had come upon a book of photographs taken in 1913 when a man named Wanamaker traveled to many tribes, with camera. The photos Dorothy worked from were black and white, probably no larger than three-by-three inches. She envisioned those real people in color, and she somehow captured the mood, the private mood, of each individual. She’d made twenty or more of the portraits, but only five were left when I discovered them. I sold the only Native woman of the five to a woman from Switzerland who insisted on carrying it securely on her person when flying home: this of course pleased Dorothy.

            About two years after her show, Dorothy called me one day. “My daughter wants to move to Arizona, and I’ll be going along. We can’t take everything. You’ve been good to me. Would you like to have most of my artwork?”

            Would I??

            The move to Arizona never happened for Dorothy….

            I attended the memorial for her on April first, this year, 2006—just two days before her 95^th birthday.

But my real memorial for her is now at my gallery, Pegasus, in downtown Bishop. There live the prints from the pastel portraits of those five Native Americans.

 There lives another young “Indian Boy,” in oil, which must have been hiding inside her house when we sifted through the big shed that first day….

And there reside many High Sierra landscapes….

            Dorothy lived and loved these mountains as I do—as, probably, you do….

Come take a look at Pegasus….

Honor one of us who honored our place and our history, who spent her long life honoring the beauty we dwell within.