Last Frontier Day
“Aunt Jean”: An Unforgettable Alaskan Artist
By Hank Nuwer
It was 1980, in northern Colorado, when I chatted with Martha Jean Shadrach for the first time. A contributing writer to Denver Magazine then, I accepted an invitation from Jane, my editor, to come to the Boulder home of her parents for a party.
Jane introduced me to the family’s lifelong friend, a former native Coloradan and ever after, said the editor, “a fascinating artist from Alaska.”
I shook hands with “Aunt Martha Jane Shadrach,” a spunky, dark-haired woman Jane knew all her life. The visitor wasn’t Jane’s aunt by blood; the “aunt” title was honorific.
The artist omitted the “Martha” part of her name when she signed her paintings.
Rarely have I been so smitten by a storyteller. During my three-hour visit, Aunt Jean talked about her adventures, many connected to her artwork and the now-shuttered Artique gallery on G Street she operated with her husband Daniel, a retired Air Force major, and co-owner Tennys Owens.
Aunt Jean told me stories about how she traveled the globe alone and with her husband, camping and adventuring. One time she journeyed to a whaling village to sketch what she saw. Always she sought artwork from seemingly every Alaska artist to put up in the downtown Anchorage gallery for sale or rent.
She explained how she boosted the income of state artists by persuading banks and corporations to rent artworks. Art patrons could purchase the art too.
Some of those statewide artists they handled included the woodblock prints of Glen A. Mast, otherwise known as a Cordova civic leader, Lawrence Ahavakana of Prudhoe Bay, Susan Pennewell Ellis of Anchorage, and Bryan Grove of Juneau. She assured artist that they had to work as hard to sell their art as they did while making it, according to a 1981 profile of her in the Alaska Daily News.
Flash forward three-plus decades. Aunt Jean’s supportive husband, a retired major who fought in Korea and World War Two, died in 1987.
In 2012, on one of my annual vacations to Alaska as a break from college teaching in Indiana, I emailed my old editor and got a phone number for Jean Shadrach.
I phoned her before embarking on a vacation. She was cordial, inviting me to her spacious, wonderfully decorated Anchorage home even though I recalled much more about her than she remembered about me.
Aunt Jean was just an older version of how I remembered her from three decades earlier, brown hair now worn in a carapace and wearing a colorful print top with matching slacks.
Once again, I was taken by how Aunt Jean made people feel that they were the most important souls in the room. She still had a sort of girlish laugh, and she laughed frequently.
Best of all, she gave me a tour of her home and studio near Lake Otis. I was mesmerized by her work: portraits, landscapes; Sumi-e watercolor flowers on silk, and bold ravens, plump-cheeked otters and polar bears.
She still spun vivid stories. One time she rented a Captain Cook hotel suite to view Denali with binoculars while she captured the glorious mountain in 20 rough sketches. Her alarm buzzed at 4 a.m. so she could paint Denali with mudflats at first light. She displayed the best of these at Artique in 1985.
She also took up a brief residency at Cordova in May of 1993 to accompany ornithologists and to offer art workshops as 20 million shorebirds arrived at the Copper River Delta.
Aunt Jean to me seemed astonishingly modest and self-deprecating for an artist of her talents.
On June 4, 2016, I found myself in Anchorage again, but this time I wasn’t alone. I’d met a Polish gal in Warsaw named Gosia, and we soon would marry.
On a whim, I called Aunt Jean, explained I was with a friend, and instantly was told to “come on over.” Gosia and Aunt Jean became instant friends, and the artist gifted her a collection of work in a pamphlet titled “Shadrach: A Collection of Jean Shadrach’s works.”
She wrote this on the cover page. “To Gosia: to remind you of your Alaska trip and to hope to see you again.”
We came over twice more on vacations, and the second time I had the audacity to ask Aunt Jean if she would consider painting a portrait of Gosia. “Send me a dozen photos of you,” she commanded Gosia.
Three months later, Aunt Jean mailed us two treasures. One was a true-to-life likeness of Gosia, and the second an abstract rendering of her. Gosia framed them and hung both with pride.
Our next time in Anchorage, now married and with a visiting friend from Poland, we received yet another tour of the house. I snapped a photo of Gosia with Aunt Jean in front of a large, almost finished abstract canvas.
That was the last time Gosia and I visited Aunt Jean.
Then, weeks before the start of the pandemic, Gosia and I took a short Spring Break trip to Alaska to visit old friends.
We stayed first at an Air B n B in Anchorage and paused at a Fred store to get eggs and fixings to cook breakfast.
We entered an aisle and bumped into Aunt Jean and her daughter Sue. As always, she gave us one of her trademark hugs. She looked the same, only this hug was more fragile than I recalled.
Aunt Jean died at 94 on January 17, 2021.
Gosia and I moved to Fairbanks for my News-Miner managing editor job.
One day I found an ad online offering a seascape by Aunt Jean. It’s a vibrant cobalt blue oil painting with whale boats in the forefront. It’s undated but perhaps her long-ago visit to a whaling village inspired her.
The painting now hangs alongside on an easel in our house. It’s positioned near a winter landscape by Helen Linck Atkinson, one of Aunt Jean’s long-ago Artique gallery artists.
I like to think Aunt Jean is visiting our house when I view it, as Gosia and I were blessed to visit her.