Her Painting Hits Jackpot of Art--$100,000

For months earlier this year, the light in the attic of the three-story 1903 Queen Anne frame home in this hamlet 35 miles north of San Francisco glowed far into the night.

Martha Borge was busy working in her attic, creating an acrylic painting on an 18- by 24-inch canvas depicting rare Bishop pines at Grossi Pond nestled in mountains at nearby Point Reyes National Seashore.

“My family said I was obsessed with this painting. I worked day and night on it, whenever I had a chance. I kept making changes. I almost ruined it several times. It was a struggling painting. But somehow I managed to finish it,” recalled the tall, blue-eyed artist with champagne-colored hair.

It was all worth it. The painting won what is described as “the richest open art competition in America”--the $100,000 Arts in the Parks contest sponsored by the National Parks Academy of the Arts.

Borge was one of 2,323 artists from 49 states who each paid a $50 entry fee to submit an original work--in watercolor, oil, acrylic, pencil or any two-dimensional medium--in the contest, in its third year.

Contestants had to enter unsigned, unframed works on the same size canvas illustrating something in any of the 368 National Park units in the nation. The winner was announced Sept. 16 at a banquet in Jackson, Wyo.

“I nearly fell through the floor. None of the artists had any hint of who was going to win until the announcement at the banquet. I have been riding a cloud ever since,” Borge said.

One of the artists allowed, “This beats the lottery. The odds to win $100,000 were one in 2,323 for a $50 investment compared to about one in 10 million in a lottery.”

Judging the contest were Douglas Lewis, curator of the National Gallery in the nation’s capital; Susan Hallsten McGarry, editor-in-chief of Southwest Art Magazine, and David Wagner, executive director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

The judges said of Borge’s painting, “It was the lighting effect that made this so irresistible, the plein-air , the feeling of the sense of the place.”

Borge’s painting shows fog in the folds of mountains overlooking the peaceful valley of pines and pond. “I tried to capture that magic moment as the sun was setting when the hills were bathed in a rusty, pink, yellow, orange glow, the apricot mood of sundown,” explained the artist.

She placed her painting in the mail at 3 p.m. on June 30, nine hours before the contest deadline. “I did not feel I had professionally finished enough of the small details, but the judges apparently didn’t care about that. It was a great stroke of luck my winning,” she mused.

Borge has been painting since she was a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. There she met her husband of 40 years, artist and art professor Ralph Borge.

“When I was young, I entered a number of contests but never won more than $100 or $200. I didn’t enter contests for years until 1987 when I read about the first Arts in the Parks $100,000 competition in Art News,” she recalled.

“I thought to myself, ‘Wow! Imagine winning a prize like that.’ So, I did a painting of cypress trees in Point Reyes at Drake’s Estero . . . selected as one of the top 100 from 2,700 entries that year,” she continued.

But Borge didn’t win that year, and she didn’t enter last year. She decided to try again this year.

The most money she has ever received for a painting until now was $5,000. She and her husband open the living room of their Victorian home and turn it into an art gallery every Sunday afternoon to exhibit their paintings.

“For painters it is always feast or famine,” Borge said with a laugh. She said she will use the prize money to fix up the house and help pay for her youngest son’s graduate school tuition at Columbia University.

Her painting and a selection of the top 100 paintings will go on a year-long national tour to museums and art galleries. Prints are made, as are calendars and cards. Proceeds go to the National Park Foundation created by Congress in 1967 to encourage the private sector’s support of the National Park Service.

Borge’s winning painting and others from the contest will also be exhibited in Europe next spring to help promote foreign tourism to America’s national parks. Her painting is now part of the National Park Foundation’s permanent collection.

The other paintings in the top 100 are sold, with the artist receiving 60% and the academy 40%. The National Parks Academy of the Arts was conceived by children’s book illustrator Patti Boyd, 41, of Jackson Hole, Wyo., who is the organization’s executive director.