Dorothy Stott moved into the Atlantic Shores Retirement Community in Virginia Beach, Virginia, nine years ago. The vibrant 94-year-old art teacher lives alone and continues to paint and to instruct a group of students —all residents—each week at the campus.
“There were no art programs when I got here,” says Stott. “ So I put up a little notice on the bulletin board in the mailroom.”
Since then, she’s taught over 80 students, and her classes go on throughout the year. She even takes her students on field trips around the community to critique paintings on the walls in an effort to add to their creative experience.
Stott graduated from Ashland University in her native Ohio. She got married and her husband, in the United States Navy at the time, was sent off to World War II. She and her children stayed in her parents’ home and she taught art to her kids and other children in the neighborhood in her parents’ basement.
Since her husband was an engineer by trade, the couple moved every seven years, living in Ohio, Texas, California, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and finally Virginia. And everywhere Stott went, she taught art.
“I missed teaching,” she explains. “So I would start up classes everywhere we went.”
Her fondest memories are of Coronado, California, a small beach community west of San Diego, California. “That was heaven on earth,” she says blissfully. “I started teaching in Coronado and the recreation department paid me.”
In that same charming southern California city, fellow resident and Stott’s student George Ikonen met his beautiful wife, Aiko, while stationed there between tours in Vietnam.
“I came back from Vietnam and was stationed in Coronado. That’s where I met Aiko. She worked at the exchange…and that’s where I picked up oil painting,” he remembers. Ikonen was sent back overseas for 13 months between 1974 and 1978.
He retired in 2008 and Aiko suggested that the couple move into a retirement community. They’ve lived at Atlantic Shores for five years, where Ikonen picked up his brushes again and started taking Stott’s classes.
“I paint on my own primarily, but I talk with the other artists in the community. We discuss color schemes, techniques and how to get unstuck when we get stuck,” smiles Ikonen, who likes to work in watercolors these days.
Ikonen won Honorable Mention in the May 2013 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts nonprofit Homes for the Aging annual show. His watercolor, “Gazebo,” depicts Aiko in a gazebo on Red Wing Lake in Virginia Beach.
Around the corner from that same lake—and a few streets down from Stott and Ikonen—resides 75-year-old Jane Webster, a former New Yorker. The former English teacher remembers visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a girl but had no interest in creating art. It wasn’t until after retiring in 2000 and volunteering as a docent at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, that Webster’s mind changed.
“I realized that if I was going to be a docent and talk about art, I needed to try it,” Webster admits.
She thumbed through art books painting the things she saw—Raphael, Monet, Vermeer and Hopper. She was swept away by the feeling that painting gave her. “It transports me,” she says. “The world that I’m living in disappears. It’s marvelous therapy.”
Her home now has become a gallery to her paintings, which spans from her kitchen and living room down the halls and into her bedrooms. She loves to experiment with different mediums in her work.
“I like the intensity of oils. I stay away from acrylics because they dry too fast and you can’t poke around. I’ve tried some watercolors, too. I think I’ll just stick with oils,” Webster says.
She encourages all new artists to visit galleries and take lessons. “Even if you think you don’t have the slightest amount of talent, but like to look at a decent picture, try it!” she says.
Webster is still in disbelief at how well she paints considering that she never did it before.
“I’m stunned,” she says. “I didn’t have any talent as far as I thought.”
