Artist Marie App has a lifelong love of honey and an appreciation for the craft of beekeeping.
Her painting of a beekeeper at work was selected for the cover of the September edition of Bee Culture magazine.
Her painting, titled “Milk and Honey” will be on display during Honey Sunday at Mosquito Hill Nature Center in New London.
The event takes place from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 19. Co-sponsored by the center and the Waupaca County Beekeepers Association, Honey Sunday includes demonstrations of honey being extracted from hives, beeswax candle dipping, two talks about bees and beekeepers, honey sundaes and home-baked goods. The cost is $8 per car.
After being shown at the Mosquito Hill event, App’s painting will go to the annual Wisconsin Honey Producers Convention set for Nov. 5-7 in Manitowoc. There the painting will be in a raffle to raise funds for the association.
App said she became interested in creating a painting with a beekeeping theme after Steven Hupfer, a Green Bay area beekeeper, came to her studio in rural Ogdensburg.
He was familiar with her work, which is displayed at Avenue Art and Coventry Glassworks, both in Appleton, and at Art Affair in Menasha. He was also hoping to persuade her to create a painting with a beekeeping theme for the upcoming national beekeepers convention.
Hupfer explained the tools and environment involved in the beekeepers work. App was hooked on the idea.
“In my 20 years of painting, I’ve usually painted in a style that combined representational and abstract styles,” App said. “But in this painting, I stayed more with representational because I wanted to be true to the beekeeper culture. I wanted to record things accurately.”
App said she researched the plants that Wisconsin bees favor, such as the basswood tree, Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions, wildflowers, cosmos, buttercups, sweet clover and alfalfa. She included some of these plants in her painting.
The painting shows a farm and cows in the background, and a working beekeeper with a small child in the foreground.
“When I completed the work, I liked it and thought that beekeepers outside of Wisconsin would like it as well. I e-mailed a picture of the painting to Kim Flottum, editor of the national magazine, Bee Culture,” App said. The following day the Medina, Ohio, publication responded by saying App’s painting would be used on a future cover.