Painting through the pandemic: Bunola resident, 83, finds comfort in her artwork

By CHRISTINE HAINES
chaines@yourmvi.com
For as long as she can remember, art has given Carol Albright a sense of accomplishment.
The 83-year-old Bunola native has turned to her art in a big way during the coronavirus pandemic, creating more than a dozen paintings in the past several weeks, turning her house, as her great-granddaughter Allyson Radford says, into a museum.
Albright recalls a time in elementary school when other students teased her because she couldn’t read, but when her teacher shared her drawing of a bear with the class, she felt proud of her work. Albright says it still amazes her when she paints something and it turns out looking the way she wants it to. Her son recently asked her to paint a wolf for a friend. She told him it was difficult to paint things to look the way people expect them to look.
“I said I had to challenge myself to make that. The first one turned into a bear. The second one I liked the trees better than the wolf. I like this one now,” Albright said of her third and final painting. “If I don’t like something, I just paint over it.”
Nearly all of Albright’s paintings are done on scrap wood, not canvas, though her great-granddaughter recently brought her a large broken clock and asked for a painting on what had been the face. Radford recently posted pictures of Albright’s paintings on Facebook and someone made an offer to buy one featuring a stream in the woods, but Albright says it’s her favorite and isn’t for sale.
“I love it. I didn’t have to change anything on it. I can see myself walking up that hill,” Albright said. “I very rarely sell anything. I usually give it away and we keep things for ourselves and display it.”
Albright does woodworking as well as painting, having gone through a period where she made bird houses in all sorts of designs and wooden decorations. She’s received jig saws and band saws and sanders as presents from her children and has donated countless items to the Bunola Civic Center as craft items for children to paint or as door prizes for raffles. She and her son even made the wooden letters on the civic center building when the Bunola Fire Company, which she had been a member of since 1957, closed and became the civic center.
“I cut them out in my kitchen,” Albright said. “My son even put a curtain between the kitchen and the living room so we don’t get too much sawdust in the living room.”
So much of her woodworking is done on the kitchen table that her children tease that if you see breadcrumbs on the table, don’t try to eat them because they’re probably sawdust, Albright jokes.
“I can find something funny in almost anything, but this virus stuff, there’s nothing funny about it,” Albright said. “I can’t even go into a store.”
And Albright loves shopping, especially at craft and hobby stores. Her family members are trying to help her through not being able to shop for her hobbies.
“Allyson goes to the store for milk and comes home with a can of paint for me,” Albright said. “I have enough paint brushes to give one to everyone in two towns.”
Albright is the daughter of a carpenter, but other than watching the Bob Ross Joy of Painting show and taking one class, Albright is self-taught.
“I knit, I crochet, sew, grow poinsettias in my window and I write books and poems, but my greatest accomplishment is my family, Walter, Linda, Will, Allyson and their families and Annie and Terri, my closest friends,” Albright said. “The only thing I have of my mother’s is something she embroidered, a scarf that went on a dresser. My kids will have plenty of things from me.”