Artist drawn to Amish illustrates life stories

When award-winning artist Virginia Krol relocated to Huntington Beach last July from her home in Indiana — where she had lived for most of her 86 years — her paintings of the Amish people she had lived with, befriended, and loved came with her.

Those paintings are on display at the Huntington Beach Central Library through April 25. Krol also donated one of her paintings to the Friends of the Library this week as a way to thank the library for giving artists a place where they could display their work.

In the early ‘60s, Krol and her husband owned a farm in Walkerton, Ind., — a 90-mile drive from the Amish settlements of Bremen and Nappanee.

Curious about the Amish people, Krol drove into Nappanee looking for pictures of the Amish that she could hang in her home, but found none.

Krol had painted some when she was younger, but had no formal training or instruction. She decided that day at age 30 to paint her own pictures of the “buggy people” she had seen.

Krol brought three charcoals she created into a local hardware store where a man on his way to Chicago spotted the works hanging in the window. He bought all three of them, and so began Krol’s career as an artist.

She continued to paint life stories of the Amish people she encountered for the next 55 years, displaying them in a gallery she owned in Indiana, as well as in other parts of the world.

One of her Amish paintings hung in the state capitol in Indiana, and another is part of the Indiana governor’s private collection.

Krol has never painted from a photograph, and since the Amish are not allowed to pose for portraits, the people who appear in her works — and the stories she tells about them — are from memory. “I miss them and I love them dearly,” Krol said. Her daughter, Suzanne Krol Boller, said her mother’s friendships with the Amish people, who invited her into their homes and stayed with her in her home in Indiana, is why Krol is “able to paint them with such feeling.” Those feelings for the Amish have recently made their way onto canvas again, as Krol’s five newest charcoals capture the loss and tragedy that occurred as a result of the shooting last October at West Nickel Mines, the Pennsylvania school where five young girls lost their lives.

Several of those paintings have recently been added to the library exhibit, and will be on display at reception Saturday at the Corner Gallery in the library.