Jackie Yuhas
by Audrée Peters

Art wasn’t a dream Jackie Yuhas had time to actively pursue with her lifestyle, even though she loved it.

“Artistic talent runs in the family,” she says matter-of-factly, and my sister is a watercolorist.”

“I’ve done art work all my life,” she says, “but I took a break from it to raise my kids.”

When Yuhas retired 15 years ago she and her husband, Ron, moved permanently to Rio Verde. After 25 years of rearing children and working as a secretary and sales administrator in California, she was aching to get back into her art work and started painting again.

She never had formal training, although she had wanted to go to art school when she got out of high school. A high school teacher had told her she didn’t have enough talent to be an artist. She naively accepted that at the time, even though it had always been the one thing she wanted to do.

“I just figured she knew best,” she says with regret. “But all my life I’ve wished I had not paid attention to her and gone ahead and done it.

“Now I’m feeling that I can and loving every minute of it.”

She admits that “My sister kept telling me it was a shame that I was wasting my talents, and she encouraged me to return to it.

“She talked me into it,” she adds with a grin.

Following her dream at last, seven years ago she started taking private lessons with a new determination and enjoyment.

Yuhas used to use watercolors but now prefers pastels over other media. In the case of oils, “you have to wait two or three days for the paints to dry,” she says. She feels impatience with the thought of wasting any more time not following her passion.

“With pastels, I’ll go in and paint sometimes for six or seven hours at a time,” she admits.  “I’m so enjoying it, sometimes I get up in the morning and before I even get dressed I have to go in there and start painting. It’s a passion. I just love it. It makes me happy, and if it makes other people happy, that’s even better.”

Although Yuhas has sold many paintings, the walls of her house are covered with her art work.

“I keep a lot around the house,” she says.

“I just started out doing it as a hobby,” she explains, “and before I knew it, people were buying my paintings. I’ve found so many people who have enjoyed my art that I’m just going to continue doing the same thing.”

But she says she will never sell some special paintings she has hanging in her home.

“I form a relationship with some of my paintings. I just really get connected to them,” she says with pleasure, as she points out one of them, a portrait of a young Indian girl.

Her enjoyment of western and Native American culture also is evident in her home.

When they moved in, she had wanted to hang a painted buffalo skin over the fireplace, but didn’t want to pay the $4,000 for one.

She got her own buffalo hide and painted it herself.

She went on to painting bowls, gourds and wood. She creates elaborate wood-burned pictures on them, then paints them with vivid pastels, often featuring nature themes and colorful animals.

She says it takes a lot of work to cut and clean the gourds before she even starts designing and painting.

“And I have probably 25 hours of wood burning on just one gourd, plus more months of work that goes into it,” she says. “There are few people who appreciate the time and effort that goes into it so that they will pay the price to buy it, so I do less now.”

Her paintings range from still life or animals -- especially horses -- to portraits of people and rustic westerns.

Many of her commissioned paintings are portraits and peoples’ pets and animals.

“Portraits are my very favorite,” she says.

“I like westerns, too,” she says. “I really enjoy doing the westerns and the cowboys.”

And whether they are animals, Indian maidens, portraits or cowboys, her paintings look as realistic as life-like photos.

“There isn’t anything I don’t like to paint,” she says, laughing.

Yuhas will be displaying some of her work in two galleries in Colorado, has participated for many years in the art shows in the Rio Verde area and in area juried shows.

“The more I do, the easier it becomes, and it gets better,” she says.

“And it just comes naturally.”

Yuhas can be reached at (480) 471-2419.

This artist was featured March 2007.