Artitude: From ashes — artist lost works, but not her spirit

Betsy Ross Koller remembers Feb. 21 as "standing at the door of Hell."

Sixty-two of her paintings, untold numbers of prints, UNICEF cards bearing her detailed work, children's books she created and, not least, five of her husband 's car collection burned in a ferocious fire that gutted their two-story Naples garage.

"If we hadn't been going out to dinner with our grandson, I would have been up there painting," she reflected grimly.

And if her grandson hadn't pulled her husband, Paul, back, he might have dashed into the garage trying to save one of the five cars in it, a nearly certain fatal risk with gas tanks roaring flames that spreading the fire exponentially.

"It all happened so fast," she said, shaking her head. Koller's dusk-gray eyes brimmed with tears occasionally as she talked, recalling the artwork, history and sentiment lost: her collection of  Swiss cow bell collars, wood carvings and photographs from the country she called home for 22 years, charred beyond return.

Rebuilding by bits

A month later, the garage is still boarded shut, its pale, painted concrete walls layered with smoke stains. A look up into its second-story windows reveals the spring sky through a jagged, yawning gap  where fire burned through the roof.

Koller says fire officials told her it may have been an oil leak hitting hot exhaust pipes in a Porsche that the two men had taken out for a drive shortly before. They haven't named a definitive cause. Yet that car had had a maintenance check just six months before, Koller said.

There were some small blessings. It had been her husband's birthday, and Koller had selected three of her works that Paul Koller especially liked to present to him. They were sitting in the safety of the house when the fire started. Another blessing: When the couple built their house, garage and utility building in 2002, they outfitted the garage with separate duct work, with the rationale of keeping car exhaust fumes away from the house. It may have saved their home.

"They were afraid the fire would go through the duct work into the house," Koller recalled of the three  "wonderful" fire departments who fought the blaze over a six-hour period. Because of the Kollers' planning, that didn't happen.

As it was, there was water around the back of the house where firefighters had hosed it down to protect it. The pungent smoke odor had permeated their home as well. Drapes, towels, clothing, sheets had to be cleaned. Furniture had to be washed down; upholstery had to be deep-cleaned; walls in the rooms closest  to the garage had to be repainted. Even art in the home had to be sent out to a specialist who could erase any smoke smell or drifted soot .

"We looked as though we had moved out. We didn't have electricity for a week, but we had machines all over the house, to exchange the air, 24 hours a day for three weeks. They powered them with a generator," she recalled.

Nearly everything in the second-story garage studio was a loss. Paintings. Prints. Children's books Koller had created in her warm style known as 18th-century naïve. Although Koller has lost the original paintings to the fire, some of those works have gone around the world as UNICEF holiday cards. Almost everyone who sees Koller's work can recall it in some form, whether on their mantel with other Christmas greetings or on the holiday wrappings of Nestlé Cailler chocolates.

Paints and cleaning chemicals, which likely contributed to the raging fire, are gone. So are paintbrushes with specific tips for her thread-thin lines or masses of dots that become heads, leaves or tiles on a faraway roof, all blooming from Betsy Ross Koller's imagination.

 For herself, for others

As bad luck would have it, many of the 62 paintings Koller lost were only temporarily in her 1,200-square-foot studio after Koller's January exhibition at the Marco Island Center for the Arts. They were awaiting their return to Europe.

Paul Koller seems a bit more philosophical about the five cars that were destroyed — among them the Porsche and an E-type Jaguar.  But Betsy Ross Koller's paintings are a piece of her heart, including some vintage scenes from her childhood home in Zanesville, Ohio, where her father was a doctor and took young Betsy on house calls.

"He told me, 'You need to give back to these people who have so much less than you,' " she recalled.

In fact, one painting Koller had not started was for just such a gift.  She has been painting a series of four seasons in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, where Koller attended before she met her husband. Each seasonal painting has been duplicated as 50 artist's proofs, 500 lithographs and a larger number of cards. The original painting is purchased by a donor who returns it to the university.  All told, the four-season project will yield $1 million in scholarships for the OU Appalachian Scholarship Fund.

It has won Koller an honorary degree from the university. She was named its alumnus of the year in 2014 (her website, betsyrosskoller.com, has the details).  This year, she'll be inducted into the Ohio Senior Citizens Hall of Fame May 18..

Koller paintings favor the historic city of Zanesville, including its Buchanan Square and the home of Wild West novelist Zane Grey, along with its surrounding Appalachian foothills. But a similar number depict villages in Switzerland, where she and her husband lived while he worked in Europe for Caterpillar Inc., the construction equipment manufacturer.

In fact, Koller first studied art in Geneva. She won her first competition there, thanks to a teacher who entered her work.

"I was overwhelmed, particularly because I was an American, not a European," she recalled. Those awards jump-started her career, she said. Galleries offered to take on her art. She developed a European clientele that included the owner of Telemundo.

"He told me 'Your paintings take me to a place I want to go back to.' "

Koller favors classic looks; her hair was pulled back into a neck-brushing ponytail and she wore a slender skirt and cable-knit azure sweater on Wednesday. She couldn't resist a smile as she recalled the reactions of some of her gallery show visitors, who are looking for a prairie maiden: "I think they expect me to be there in a Laura Ashley dress."

It's a delightful coincidence that other people feel about her art the way she does. "The fact that you enjoy it makes me happy. But I paint for me," Kohler said.

Going forward, not back

Koller, 73, concedes this has been hard on her spirit: She says she needed the grief counseling the fire department referred to her. The agony of having to describe each item for insurance claims adjusters brought the pain back over and over.

"You can handle this when you're young, but there's a turning point," she said."This has devastated me.

"My first impulse was, 'How can I ever start painting again?' "

Each painting can take from one to two months. "You can't paint everything over."

Then she received her mandate. A group of friends got together and held a party for her two weeks ago, buying painting supplies and collecting $1,000 to help her buy new brushes.

Koller will paint again. And she will not keep her first new painting. It will go to Ohio University to give back, just as her father taught her.

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