On Aug. 25, Montezuma Castle National Monument joined the vast network of national parks and monuments across the U.S. celebrating the National Park Service’s 106th birthday.
As a gift to visitors, the monument hosted a free Art in the Park program, where Camp Verde artist Sylvia Strobel provided pastels, paper and technical advice to anyone who wanted to draw.
Strobel, a recently-retired biology teacher formerly of the Orme School in Mayer, explained that she selected pastel as a medium because, “if you mess up, you can just go over it.”
One visitor, Chi Uhiara, had never used pastel before.
“I like to draw bubble letters and things like that,” Uhihara said. “I want to venture out and see and just go deeper to see how good I can draw.”
Strobel provided Uhihara with a “crash course” to cover the basics of working with pastels and guided her through the first phase of her drawing, explaining the principle of layering colors from dark to light.
Uhihara’s drawing quickly evolved from an amorphous background to include the familiar shapes of the “Castle” [the monument’s ancient Sinagua cliff dwelling] and the surrounding rock wall and vegetation.
“I’m happy,” Uhihara beamed. “[Drawing] makes me go back to my normal self. I want to be an artist.”
Strobel said now that she is retired, she plans to spend more time making art.
“I just want to see where it goes,” she said.
Currently, Strobel enjoys working with pastel and oil paint on a variety of natural surfaces, such as Artist’s Conk mushroom, a wild-growing shelf fungus.
“It’s a fungus that grows on trees and actually looks like a shelf,” she said.
photo by Daulton Venglar, Larson Newspapers
Strobel shared a photograph of one of her conk pieces, a lifelike rendering of the V Bar V Solstice Calendar petroglyph site, which she’d complimented with stylized vegetation crafted out of various plants.
“I’m very into archaeoastronomy,” she said. “It amazes me, the knowledge and the observational skills they had to figure this [calendar] out. It’s fascinating.”
Strobel said that while she does not have a website or portfolio yet, she was encouraged when a friend wanted to purchase two of her pastel landscapes via a social media post.
“I was shocked,” she said of the offer.
For Strobel, making art in places like Montezuma Castle “feels like getting the spiritual essence of the place.”
“That [essence] is what I like to convey and I’ve been told I do that very well,” she said. “I look at something like the Artist’s Conk, and it tells me what to do. I know it sounds crazy, but it does.”
Strobel mused that her intuitive approach is the opposite of the scientific mind that she’d developed after years of teaching biology.
However, Strobel noted that art and science go hand-in-hand.
Though Strobel’s artwork is blossoming and she looks forward to working in her newly-built studio, she still makes the time to teach one class at the Orme School and plans to volunteer at the school’s Dorothy Swain Lewis Fine Arts Festival in February.
“Artists from around the country come and the students are immersed in art for a week, it’s fabulous,” she said.