Art instructor noted for her watercolors

6/16/2006

FREMONT - Lois Anne Rogers Van Dyne, 81, a watercolor artist and an art instructor at Terra Community College here, died of cancer Wednesday in the Hospice of Northwest Ohio, Perrysburg Township.

Mrs. Van Dyne, who took art classes at Bowling Green State University in the late 1970s, created her watercolors over a period of about 30 years, beginning in the mid 1970s.

A member of the Ohio Watercolor Society and the Northwest Ohio Watercolor Society, she also taught art for the last five years to nontraditional students in the ElderCollege program at Terra.

Noted for realistic depiction of natural light and its reflections, Mrs. Van Dyne's watercolors have been exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art; Ohio State University; the Canton (Ohio) Art Institute, and the Rutherford B. Hayes museum complex in Fremont.

Many are owned by corporate and private collections.

Mrs. Van Dyne also volunteered as a tutor at Fremont Middle School in the 1990s and founded a volunteer reading program in second-grade classrooms throughout the city.

"My mother was driven by the desire to share the beauty she saw in the world with others," her son, Lawrence Van Dyne, said. "She saw the extraordinary in the ordinary, and her painting showed that to others."

A native of Mountain Lakes, N.J., Mrs. Van Dyne, whose maiden name was Rogers, graduated from Mountain Lakes High School in the mid 1940s.

She later attended Pratt Institute of Brooklyn for two years and worked in advertising in Manhattan until 1948, when she married Howbert Bennett Van Dyne. He died in 1994.

Mrs. Van Dyne was a member of First Presbyterian Church in Fremont.

Surviving are her son, Lawrence Van Dyne; daughters, Linnea Van Dyne, Kathryn Van Dyne, and Meredith Moore; brother, Henry Rogers; sister, Janice Cooper, and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. June 25 in First Presbyterian Church, Fremont. There will be no visitation. Arrangements are by the Newcomer Funeral Home, Toledo.

The family suggests tributes to the Hospice of Northwest Ohio.