Published: March 06, 2009 10:09 am      

ART: The late Polly King honored with exhibit

The first thing that captures the viewer’s attention upon entering the second floor of the Niagara Falls Public Library is the color.

Dozens of paintings in all mediums line the main corridor, most of which use an amalgamation of colors that dwarf the offerings in a jumbo box of crayons.

The viewer can’t help but crack a smile upon this hailstorm of hue — which is Don King’s precise point.

The well-known Niagara Falls resident, who serves on the Niagara Falls School Board and the board of Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, put about 60 creations made by his late mother on display through April 30. The wide variety of works, including landscapes, portraits and watercolors, is meant to offer a temporary reprieve from what have been hard times in the region of late.

“Nobody’s enjoying what they’re doing anymore. Nobody’s talking good about anything,” he said. “Our community is not only depressed financially and economically, but also culturally.”

To that end, Don King hopes to introduce as many people as possible to his mother’s work. A prolific painter who put brush to canvas — or pen to paper, or whatever utensil to whatever medium she could find — Polly King painted for eight decades before passing away in 1993.

Clearly proud of his mom’s legacy, a beaming Don King spent a good part of a recent morning expounding upon the various creations he put on display, including a painting of a Miami beach made during King’s college days in Florida in the 1950s and three contrasting paintings of a Spanish landscape as seen from the patio of the apartment Polly King once occupied.

“It is a priority for me to enjoy her art,” said King, who boasted about her mother’s work with the noted painter Charles Burchfield and her studies in Europe and New York City.

On display at Memorial, the Weinberg Campus and many other public places, Polly King’s work is also represented in several private collections, including that of Betty Babanoury, the library’s director.

“I look at this as an ensemble of her work,” she said of the exhibit. “Some of her work is very powerful.”

The exhibit opened Wednesday with an open house and features several notable local pieces, including several paintings of the cataract and an original Artpark program from its debut season over which Polly King sketched that night’s performers. The exhibit as a whole, according to her son, should benefit anyone who views it.

“If you surround yourself with happy things, you can’t help but feel better about yourself,” Don King said. “This is a wonderful therapeutic thing for me — better than aspirin.”