Painting beacons of hope

Home Culture Painting beacons of hope

With 115 lighthouses in Michigan, it’s a lighthouse-lover’s heaven. Hillsdale county resident Mary Segur lives in Osseo and spends her retirement time painting lighthouses all throughout Michigan, selling them at art shows and events throughout the state.

When little Mary Segur was just a 1st-grader living in Toledo, her mother took her to the Toledo Museum of Art. Edward Drummond Libbey, the first president of the museum, had stipulated that, into perpetuity, the museum would be free for the public and children could receive free art lessons. The students only had to pay for materials.

“They had good teachers, and they taught you every aspect you can imagine,” Mary Segur said, reflecting on her years in Toledo. “They had clay modeling, pen and ink,  and tempera paints. You would graduate, and you could try watercolor and oil.”

Every day from 1st-6th grade, Segur received art lessons, and eventually, having graduated into watercolor and oil, she began to take private lessons in high school.

As a high school teacher for 25 years, Segur saw many schools go through budget cuts, and even as an English teacher she always objected to the elimination of, or reduced funding for, music and art programs.

“I always argue that practicality isn’t the whole purpose of schooling any more than it is of life,” she said. “The thing that artists create, whether it be music or literature or the visual arts, are not only expressions of their talent and their message, but they’re also a way of bonding people together.”

Segur said she’s done landscape and portraits, but portraits are a lot of work.

“I must have been in my mid-twenties, and visited Ludington State Park, and saw the Big Sable Point Lighthouse,” Segur remembered. “You have to walk about two miles down the beach before you see it. I just was mesmerized. I fell in love with it.”

For Segur, the bond between this sea of language and cultural barriers represents what she loves about lighthouses. It brought her closer to expressing a human bond that is often missing in everyday life.

“What drew me to the lighthouses was really what they stood for,” Segur said. “They’re kind of from a time when people were more willing to risk their life to save a total stranger. I don’t see people doing that today. The keeper that stayed there had to get in a boat and row out in a horrible storm to try to save people who were drowning from a shipwreck.”

While the lighthouse represents the necessity of community, the beacon of light symbolizes hope in the midst of a storm. It has a sort of salvific quality from the waves.

“Something about that beacon of light and the way it turns, it’s symbolic of a lot more than just showing sailors the way,” she said. “A lot of churches have adopted the symbol of a lighthouse because there’s a parallel there. It has a metaphorical application to your life.”

Since she first fell in love with lighthouses in 1982, Segur has painted a great number of the lighthouses in the Great Lakes area and Michigan. Her friend and fellow artist, Rich Katuzin, who draws similar subjects with pen and ink, takes photographs of the lighthouses for Segur to use as reference, since painting plein air didn’t turn out as she would have liked.

“I used to paint plein air and I had an easel, and I was painting with oils,” Segur said. “I had gotten a palette knife and I was really putting it on thick because I was doing waves, and all a sudden that wind picked up and blew the canvas off. It went face down in the sand. And it was like ‘Oh! Texture!’ I decided right then and there that I couldn’t do it.”

Living in a little house on Lake Pleasant in Osseo, with model ships sitting on the window sill above the front door, Segur filled her home with her paintings of lighthouses. Her painting she now calls her “retirement hobby.”

Along with her paintings, Segur sells high-quality copies of her work and cards that include the history of each lighthouse on the back.

As she travels to various art shows, Segur is able to talk with those who have similar interests as well as with people who have never quite understood the hopeful and valuable symbolism in both art and lighthouses.

Segur admitted the hobby will never make her rich, but after she sells a painting it does pay for gas, paints, and canvasses so she can start all over again.