Paul Martin Kingery

Painting the Mountain Paul Martin Kingery

The rich stories of great women are often lost to history. Their achievements are in a vein that ill fits the genre of heroic male biography that has predominated for centuries. They slip quietly from this life leaving their greatest achievements in the hearts of those who have known them. Their stories must be gleaned from those they have touched and from the fragments of their lives saved in drawers and cupboards, private diaries, and records. Their achievements are measured in terms of inner strength and beauty, the evidence of which is seldom tangible. Ina Pruitt was a great woman. Born in a shack on the Western frontier of the U. S., she struggled against the odds to educate herself. In college she was a free spirit. She married for love and became a devoted mother. Raising four children in desperate poverty, she forsook personal aspirations until the task was complete. She suffered with courage and silence the plights common to women: miscarriage, childbirth, kidney infections, vaginal cancer, hysterectomy, osteoporosis, glaucoma, blindness, and heart disease. Her special triumph is seen in her art, inspired by the wilderness that she loved, expressing a beauty that transcended her life experience. Her adult life was spent along Oregon's beautiful McKenzie River between Walterville and Blue River. Her summers and falls for nearly 40 years after her children were raised, were spent on Steens Mountain in Southeastern Oregon. This geological uplift in the midst of the arid high desert, was once covered by glaciers that carved deep gorges with crystal streams, wildflower-strewn meadows, sage brush, mountain mahoganies, cottonwoods, and aspen groves. Gentle mule deer shared this beautiful, silent world with both artist and hunter in an era that is now past. But the beauty remains, on the mountain, on the canvases which Ina painted, and in the souls of those she touched. Ina painted subjects throughout the Northwestern U. S., focusing on Oregon, celebrating the beauty of natural scenes, flowers, and wildlife, and those who came to appreciate them: Native Americans, missionaries, gold prospectors, early settlers, sheep and cattlemen, lumbermen, founders of cities, hunters, and fishermen.