After many years of painting, 63-year-old Reading resident Paula Victoria Paige is getting her time to shine.
Paige’s art will be one of the featured collections at an exhibit at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Wichita on Saturday. Paige’s son, Kevin Paige, is featuring the exhibit as a part of his company, Paige Enterprises.
Paula Paige said she began painting and sketching when Kevin Paige was about 7 years old.
“We lived way out in the country,” Paige said, adding that her son would come home with library books and she would sketch things out of the books. “I never had any real schooling (in art).”
However, Paige did take an art class from the Emporia Recreation Center, she added.
Paige said she never traced anything. She just drew and painted things that she saw. She said she painted Precious Moments, baskets of fruit, Mickey and Minnie and a lot of other Disney characters.
“There’s so many of them,” she said.
She often would go to the store and visit the baby department and she would see a tag she liked on an item such as a diaper bag. She’d ask if she could have one and then take it home and sketch it.
Paige enjoys artwork, she said.
“Because it’s from the heart,” she said. “It makes me feel good. It gives me something to do and makes me stay out of trouble!”
Although she hasn’t painted in a while now, Paige said she often gave her works as gifts.
“It was fun at the time,” she said. “We could all get together and read and draw.”
“Paula’s mother worked as a janitor for a big insurance firm,” Kevin Paige said. “Paula’s mother, knowing her daughter loved art, noticed the trash was always filled with a lot of good industrial paper and started bringing it home so she could have a painting surface to work with. Some of Paula’s most cherished work was captured with the most rudimentary of art supplies.”
When Paige asked his mother if she would allow her work to be featured in the Wichita show, she reacted with surprise.
“When we asked Paula to be our featured artist, she winced and humbly looked at me over her glasses, pushed back her silver strands of hair and said ‘Gosh, I don’t know. Do you really think somebody would want to look at these old things?’”