July 4, 2004
By THEO JEAN KENYON
of the Journal Star
PEORIA - It's a roomy, comfortable house shaded by towering black walnut trees, but for artist Nichole Gronvold-Roller, one of her home's best features is the attic where she has her studio.
I try to get in at least an hour every evening," she says with a smile that concedes sons Logan, 2½, and Isaac, 8 months, can change that.
Still, she hasn't stopped painting and is currently completing a series of interiors of Peoria's historic Pettengill-Morron House at 1212 W. Moss Ave.
The series will be a part of a four-artist exhibit titled "Neo Offertory of Architectural Inspirations" opening Aug. 5 at the Illinois State Museum's Southern Illinois Artisans Shop at Rend Lake. The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 30, also will feature watercolors of buildings on wrinkled paper by Ray Canty of Peoria, three-dimensional sculptures by Thomas Norpell of Montgomery and sculptures by John Medwedeff of Murphysboro.
Three of Gronvold-Roller's Pettengill-Morron interiors, including an entrance hallway, bathroom and a lamp, are completed, with two more still to be finished. One will be a bedroom in the Victorian house, while the other, she says, "may be a bedpan."
A native of northwestern Minnesota and a graduate of Minnesota State University at Moorhead, Minn., just across the state line from Fargo, N.D., she earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in art education in 1997 and is taking classes at Bradley University to earn her master's degree.
She and her husband, Nick Roller, a mechanical engineer, moved to Peoria in 1998
when he was hired by Caterpillar Inc.
The home they found along Farmington Road belonged in the Bourland Dairy family for many generations, and it provides a spacious rural setting with views of cornfields nearby.
Gronvold-Roller first took a job here as a substitute teacher in Bartonville, then taught for a time at the Peoria Art Guild before being hired by Tremont High School, where she has been the art teacher since 1998.
She has 130 students coming into her classes this year, she says, including "a lot of freshmen." Many of her advanced studio students are "very talented" and have won in Midstate Conference competitions.
While she has painted landscapes and views of house exteriors, she recently shifted her focus to interiors, and when she wrote to the Peoria Historical Society to ask if officials knew anyone who would let her into the homes the society owns, the reply she received said she probably could go inside the Pettengill-Morron House and take photos.
Which she did.
She believes her expressionistic style of the interiors is influenced by her own view of the 1860s-era home: "I feel it's a museum."
In her work, Gronvold-Roller uses color as a tool to captivate the power and mood of her subjects. She enjoys distorting the perspective in many of her paintings, but she tries to include a reference to reality to keep spatial quality present.
One of her favorite paintings in her Pettengill-Morron House series is of a lamp that she had heard about even before visiting the house.
"I had seen a story about 'John's ugly lamp,' and when (site manager) DeAnn Ruggles gave me the tour of the house, she pointed out the lamp," Gronvold-Roller says.
She paints only in acrylic now, since discovering she was allergic to oils.
"It's really challenging, because they (acrylics) dry so fast, I do a lot of layering with color coming through," Gronvold-Roller says.
Of her technique with acrylic, she says, "I paint as if I'm drawing with my pen, and I have a mental image of what I want to accomplish."
She doesn't do portraits often but one in her living room titled "Lady of Pisa" captures with the force of a Van Gogh the face of an attendant who collected the fees in a washroom in Italy when she visited there.
There's also a portrait of Darian, the family's English bulldog, in her puppy years.
Gronvold-Roller's work has been exhibited in Chicago in connection with the Illinois Artisan Association, which also is connected with an upcoming exhibit in southern Illinois.
As for that hyphentated name - Nichole Gronvold-Roller - she admits she takes a lot of ribbing from her husband. At her work she is plain Nichole Roller, but she signs her artwork Gronvold-Roller because Gronvold is her maiden name.
She says her husband, Nick, is a major help in her artwork, not only by watching over Logan and Isaac while she paints, but also in stretching canvas and making frames for her paintings. And eventually he will remodel the attic studio, she says.
