How do you preserve a lifetime of creativity, once the artist has gone?

In Bemidji, the family of beloved BSU Professor Marley Kaul, found the answer through a labor of love, completing a final book series to honor his vision and the deep impact he left on the Northwoods.

Join us for a story of art, memory, and a family's ultimate tribute.

This is Up North Arts.

Production funding of Up North Arts is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

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I think, this area, which was foreign to me in 1967, was a place that I had not, frequented.

I was a gardener.

I didn't know how to garden in zone three.

I didn't, I didn't appreciate the the lack of deciduous trees.

It was all new.

I had to learn about my place.

I have come to love my place.

And it's home.

As an artist, it's the subject matter that I use on a day to day basis.

I don't need to go to some exotic other place in order to find meaning.

And the meaning is all around me.

Marley Kaul was a painter, based in Bemidji, Minnesota.

He also taught art for 34 years.

Very well loved.

His paintings were, sought after and collected, in the, in the five state area.

And, he also happens to be our father.

So I met Marley, at Mankato State when I was a freshman in the art department and painting class.

And I talked to him about, you know, his background.

And he was born on a farm.

Raised on a farm.

He was a farmer with his two brothers and his dad.

And, everyone assumed that he'd be a farmer.

But then there were three families that had to live off the farm, and Marley thought it just wasn't enough for a fourth family.

So he went to college on a baseball and basketball scholarship, and then he took a night class at Mankato State, and he fell in love with painting and art.

So he decided that's what he wanted to major in.

People asked him if he was just going to be an artist.

And so he and he so he decided that he probably should be a teacher of art as well as an artist.

And that satisfied his parents.

And they they were happy that he'd be making a good living.

So when Marley saw that there was an opening at Bemidji State for a one year position in the art department, he applied.

And he interviewed for that job and he got it.

The vets were coming home from Vietnam War and the population of students was expanding.

And, so he was hired to teach that year.

But the population of students kept expanding.

So they gave him a tenure track position the next year, and we never left Bemidji.

So I met him as a freshman.

And, had a couple watercolor classes with him.

And he made an impact on me right away.

He was very calm and confident about who he was.

He was really generous of spirit with everyone in the class.

He sat us all down and we thought we'd be painting that day, and we sat around in the painting room and he started pulling out canvases.

And he talked about his college days, undergrad and graduate school, and he pulled out paintings that he still had from his undergraduate and graduate program.

And he talked about how painting and how artists evolve and change and work on different problems.

And he allowed each of us not to, he didn't make us do his work.

He allowed us to find a style that, you know, do the assignment, but find it in a style that was comfortable and familiar with you.

So we came to Bemidji in 1962 and he retired in 1997.

He has a studio on our property, separate building.

And his dream after he retired was to be able to paint full time there.

I mean, he was teaching full time and painting full time during his teaching career.

But after he retired from teaching, he continued to paint full time.

And he produced, you know, over 500 works in his lifetime.

I think, you know, his subject matter was always, the the land around him, our house, our travels, whatever he could see, he would kind of put together in paintings.

Sometimes abstract and sometimes, you know, realistic.

And then it went sort of introspective into his mind, and became sort of what he was not necessarily seeing, but thinking about.

Ya, he did lots of drawings a head of time of his ideas and some worked and some didn't.

And so some of the decisions that I make are not predetermined.

They're determined by what's going on in the painting.

With the painting.

It's like playing a ball game, where you've had good intentions and you find yourself behind and you change your strategy.

I like to use athletic analogies.

I'm a baseball fan Pretty much started with oil paint and then found he was a little bit allergic to oil paint.

So then he switched to acrylic paint.

So drawing, ink, acrylic paint.

Now, acrylic is a water based material and dries very, very fast.

And so I had to learn an entirely new process.

Where before I was waiting for paint to dry.

And now, I was saying, don't dry so fast.

He really did it for himself.

And that's what drove him.

And he had a lot of discipline around that.

He would become noticed by, you know, the North Dakota Museum of Art.

The Weisman Museum has a piece in his collection.

So his work began to get noticed, but he never drove that.

He was just really painting for himself.

He had to teach egg tempera painting to his class once, so he had to learn it himself.

And so he got some books and made his own paint, which is what the early egg tempera painters did egg yolk, water, a little oil, I believe, and pigment.

And, so he, he did that and learned how desperately slow that was.

It's sort of like watching the garden grow The garden is, planted, And then it takes some time for those to sprout up, and then it takes a great amount of time before they become mature fruits.

He loved it.

And so he just kept making tempera paintings along with acrylic paintings.

Well, growing up around all of this art was always it was just a part of our daily life.

And, we got used to dad working on paintings and drawing, sometimes in the house in the winter, sometimes out in the studio.

I guess we didn't realize quite how much work he was getting done.

We must have left him alone enough.

Just amazing stuff.

So it was always a creative atmosphere.

You know, later, when I went to college and came back, we started having conversations about art a little differently than you can when you're growing up.

And, you know, I'm a musician, and we would talk about the relationships between mixing music and mixing paint and just wonderful, wonderful times.

We were always offered all the supplies and, and opportunities to create that we wanted.

So we had drawing tables on either side of the TV, and for a long time in the family room, and we would sit and draw and, you know, it was, it was the time when there were maybe three channels available.

So we drew a lot, and just grew up that way.

And he was always teaching us.

I don't think I realized it then, but looking back, he was always educating about, seeing and really looking at things and the smallest details on a leaf, you know, as he was gardening, he would say, look at that.

Look at that bug did.

And, so he taught us to see He never pushed us into a, into a path.

But I ended up getting my BFA in painting at Bemidji State with him.

And it was a wonderful experience.

I was speaking recently about the book and thinking back about my education, and I really didn't have one of those pivotal moments in a class where he said something that changed my life, like many students have had, because I grew up with it, it was just in the air that we breathed and part of the the environment that we grew up in.

So, having him as a professor and instructor and mentor and advisor was a pretty amazing experience.

But I've been working since, seriously, since the early 60s.

And professionally as well.

And I came to Bemidji in 1967 and, to teach painting.

And so I have this backlog of, images 40 some years that I'm now compiling into a book so that I can study it, first of all, for myself to discover what my language was and what it is now and what shapes occur and reoccur.

And probably that would be very helpful in understanding where I've been.

I think it was 2014 that Marley found out he had, kind of a pulmonary condition and, you know, it wasn't something that was gonna affect him right away, but, you know, something that was sort of gradual.

But it got him musing a little bit about, you know, his life.

And he had a new grandchild on the way, his first grandchild.

And, so he started writing letters to her, thinking, well, if if I'm not around, I want to have these letters to tell her what I really think about art and about all the things he would have shared with her.

Well, it turned out that he got to meet his granddaughter, but these letters were so powerful.

He showed them to a friend, Kathleen Wefland.

And Kathleen looked at them and said, you know, these would make a great book.

And as it happened, each of the letters was written about a certain piece of art that he had done.

One of his egg tempera series.

And as they looked at it, they thought, well, we could pair, a letter on one side and the art on another.

And I think Sandy and and Kathleen and, and Marley talked it through and decided to make a book.

And the first one came out in 2015 called Letters to Isabella.

Later on, more books followed.

Marley has a great friend, Geri Wilimek Geri was once a student of Marley's, they would have these conversations at the coffee shop about art and about philosophy.

And Geri writes poetry.

So they would have big conversations, and Geri would go home and and write some poetry, and Marley would go home and paint.

And as it turned out, they decided to pair the poetry and the art in a book called We Sit.

We Sit came out a few years after Letters to Isabella and they followed that up with a third book, For Now, which also pairs poetry and art.

Later on, around 2020, Marley had the idea of looking back at his lifetime of making art and and perhaps creating a retrospective.

He started out on book four by going through all of his slides, and he went through them with his book designer, Lynn Phelps.

They kind of looked at the slides, decided which one might be reproducible.

And, I think there were just boxes and boxes of slides from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

He wrote an introduction for the book, kind of indicating what he wanted to do with it.

Well, after Marley passed away, we talked about how we were going to go forward and we thought that the three of us would finish that book and along with the editor and the designer, and we'd have to make some decisions about what was going to be in the book and what was not.

But we basically have about 300 images in the book.

So it's a really representative volume of his painting career.

When we, looked at going into the book four process, we really looked to Sandy, to guide us.

Because she had been through the previous three books with Marley.

She knew the publishing business.

They had set up their own publishing company, and she also with, you know, a master's in museum studies, she had a real knowledge of how an art book should be presented.

What are the important things to have in it?

What is the level of quality to expect?

And it was high, so we had to meet her standards.

And we're really glad that she was there to guide us.

For the past three books, we had done some book release events.

Marley would do a book signing and everyone wanted to meet Marley and and get his book and they did events, I think Marley and Sandy did events at booksellers, you know, Barnes and Nobles, and things like that, and, and maybe some art centers as well.

And so we thought the same thing for this new book to get it out there, especially in the areas that, that Marley's art was collected, you know, the whole Bemidji area, there are so many people that own his paintings in Grand Forks.

That whole area owns a lot of his paintings.

And, and down in Minneapolis as well.

As we thought about it, we thought, well, doing this book is is just incredible.

It would be great if there was some kind of exhibit of his art to go along with it.

And we contacted Alice Blessing at the Talley Gallery at BSU.

And, as it happened, she had an an open spot September and October of 2025.

And that was exactly the time when the book was being released.

So we looked at each other and we rolled up our sleeves and we, set about getting the art ready for an exhibit, which is no small feat.

I think this one's the fox.

With Alice's husband, Mitch Blessing, helping us stretch canvases and having some friends in Minneapolis, mat and frame some works, we were able to put together a retrospective art exhibit that kind of parallels what the book does.

Well, we only have a certain amount of works available these days because, most of his work is either in museums or private collections.

So we looked at what we had, and picked out sort of the representative pieces from each chapter or each decade, and cleaned them up and, and made them presentable and.

Yeah, it's, it was, not difficult to choose the works, it was difficult to edit.

In the course of, looking at all the works in his studio that were in storage, we found some paper pieces and some old drawings that we hadn't seen before, some from the time when he was a student, but you could already see his style developing.

So we really, we photograph those and included them in the book.

Then we, unrolled some canvases that had been rolled, and I hadn't seen some of these works before.

I was a little kid at the time, so they were there, but I didn't, I wasn't a part of the process.

So, it was great to see them unrolled and then kind of discover them.

The exhibit being at the Talley Gallery was really special, because when, when Marley was teaching at BSU, his partner, Sandy, was the gallery director at the Talley.

So it was a bit of a homecoming.

We had a really nice turnout for the opening.

We had a lot of old friends show up.

We had family come from out of town that we hadn't seen.

We had students that, of Marley’s that came out of the woodwork.

They were all surprised by what they saw because I think each of them had seen, a section of his work, a time of his work.

Some knew the 80s, some knew the 70s, but none of them had seen all of this.

They didn't realize how much he had done over the years, how many different styles he had tried.

As Kathy Wefland noted in her introduction to the book, He knows about color, and he uses color in a way that is really unusual.

He's able to use a lot of intense, bright colors.

He can draw.

And so color, as Kathy said, color was his medium.

Color was what he used to communicate, no matter the subject matter.

And not every artist is a great colorist.

So I think that's one of the things that stands out.

My favorite painting is the one that's at the the entrance right under the name Talley Gallery.

And it has a crow in the foreground.

And he used color that I hadn't seen before.

And it it's almost neon, but it's a light source that's coming from within the forest.

And it, it glows in a, in an eerie way which draws me.

I just love that, that effect that it had.

It's, unique in his painting style.

I took a, workshop, at the Watermark.

At our last meeting, we were we were supposed to bring an idea for a pitch.

Because we all were promoting our books or about to promote books.

And the most important part, in terms of doing some promotion and marketing is having a short and sweet and effective pitch.

And all of the other people, all the four other people in the group were writers, and I'm not a writer.

So I tried my hand at writing a pitch and, there was kind of silence after I read it.

And then, Will Weaver said, and then afterwards I said, you know, the truth is, my kids and I had to get ourselves together and make a plan for finishing this book, because we promised Marleey we would.

So.

And, Will Weaver said, Sandy, that's your pitch.

Being able to kind of follow the footsteps of Marley through his career, almost as if you were doing a biography on someone you didn't know.

I uncovered things I really didn't know.

You know, really learned a lot about him, as a, as a person, which was surprising to me.

You know.

But I also learned a lot about art and, about making a book.

And so I think ultimately, though, it confirmed my belief that his, his art is important.

It always felt important to me, but, but delving into the details and really looking at it analytically, it held up.

It's the real deal.

I learned a lot about Marley through it, kind of, especially going through the writings and understanding where his thought process was through different, genres of, of what he was painting.

And there was a, you know, just a strong connection of his, connection to family and the land through all of it.

And so it was a big learning experience for me.

I think the great thing about doing that project, not just finishing the book for Marley, but for finishing it together, because we all are different people.

We have different opinions.

We, we, we kind of debated some things among us and came to some good decisions.

And it wasn't easy putting together a book this size and tackling old paintings, for 60 years worth of paintings.

So.

So I think that's, that was one of the benefits of, of doing the book.

Before he was, taken to the hospital and passed away, he was in the middle of a series of egg tempera paintings, and he had done drawings on all of them.

And then he had begun to add black and white on all of them.

And then they were all going to be black and white and gray.

And, one day he just couldn't help himself.

He started using color, and pretty soon all his preliminary, all these panels had some color in them.

One had a lot of color.

And then as they went to the end, less and less color.

And so it's in my dining, that group is in my dining room and and it's in the book.

And it's in the at the end of the book.

And along with it is a beautiful poem by Geri Wilimek, who is his friend.

So That turned out to be a beautiful ending to the book.

Yeah.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the members of Lakeland PBS.