Lake Life

Local artist discusses her attraction to Cedar Creek Lake
By Pearl Cantrell
Monitor Staff Writer
SEVEN POINTS-Like so many others, Dallas residents Rachel and Bob Beer retired to Cedar Creek Lake looking for a new beginning.
Both frequent cruise ship passengers, the couple wanted to relocate somewhere north of Houston but close enough to Galveston.
“We loved to travel,” she said.
A retired college art professor, Rachel was also drawn to the wonder of nature; the couple has a modest home on the water in Arnold Hills.
“We weren’t interested in fishing or boating,” Rachel explained. They enjoyed watching the lake in its various moods and the flora and fauna outside their back door.
Bob’s death two years ago cut short the couple’s idyllic home on the lake experience. However in that crisis event, Rachel received a second blessing she’s sure would never have been the case in the city.
Though Rachel arrived at the emergency center in Gun Barrel City with her husband having expired in the backseat, while she chattered away en route that all would be just fine, the emergency care personnel were extra caring of her feelings.
“They called my husband’s doctor, and he left his clinic to come to me,” Rachel said. Besides telling her of Bob’s death and offering kind words, he afforded her a last good-bye and prepared her for what would follow.
“That would never have happened in the city,” she said. “Though Cedar Creek Lake doesn’t have many specialists or high-tech solutions. It has a great deal of truly caring individuals working in the healthcare industry.”
Now, Rachel finds herself alone with her memories, her art and her penchant for travel.
Last year, she went to France and Italy. This month, she’s going to Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes.
“I’ve always found that travel has the power to change my point of view,” Rachel said.
As an artist, she has used point-of-view as a filter to create something magical for the viewer. It helps unfold a thought inside another mind, where it can take a new form before being passed on to the next mind, she explained.
But just now Rachel seeks a point-of-view to help her redefine herself as a widow in early retirement in an environment conducive to social events for couples.
But slowly and surely, she has been redefining who she is over the last two years. She joined some of the women in her neighborhood for regular exercise at the Olympic Center and allowed them to recruit her into the Cedar Creek Lake Garden Club.
“I had never participated in a flower show,” she said of the recent Garden Club event at the nearby library. She did pretty well for a first-timer, too.
Her unique floral sculpture titled “Magellan’s Sea Pearls” was awarded a Blue Ribbon in that category.
“It was an eye-opener to see how the judging was done,” she said.
She noted the warm-heartedness of its members and the variety of service projects the club takes on.
“If I’m going to volunteer, I’d rather do it outside,” she said.
Most recently, the Garden Club planted bulbs and scattered wildflower seeds at the Veterans Memorial Park in Mabank. Its members also care for the landscaping at the library, she added.
Rachel was one of those women who flourished in the opportunities an expanding community college system offered in the ’80s.
“While male teachers, saw work at community colleges as a stepping stone to teaching at a four-year university, women instructors were just grateful to have the income and flexible work schedule while they reared children; or appreciated the health care benefits offered,” she explained.
A student of the Kansas City Institute of Art, Rachel found employment teaching night classes and later as an administrative assistant to a university chancellor. “I created his monthly five-minute slide show presentation on the progress of the university’s building program,” she related.
When a new campus was ready to open and in need of an art department, she had the good reference from the chancellor and found herself directing an art department for the first time.
“When I told him, I’d never done anything like that, he said, ‘You’ll learn, won’t you,’” Rachel retells.
And she did.
Along the way, she was able to spend a summer in Italy and saw how studies abroad program close-up could work on a community college level, something unheard of at that time. She came back with all kinds of ideas.
The whole six-week, 15-credit study program was designed to operate just as the other campus-based semester courses did, costing a mere $9/day, she said. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.”
What she liked best about chaperoning/teaching 12 to 54 young adults was seeing the positive effect taking place at the successful planting of a thought, idea or experience.
“Those young people came back different people, better people,” she said.
Over the next 20 years, she was involved in that program in one way or another.
From her many travels to Italian and North Texas art museums, she has noticed a correlation between the two locations.
“I think a lot of military servicemen from Texas found themselves in Italy during the war and many I suspect brought back (many minor) pieces of art as souvenirs,” she said.
That’s one of the reasons Rachel is a regular visitor to Big Daddy’s Flea Market. “I see myself as an art rescuer,” she chuckles.
That is when she’s not working in her studio painting and drawing the many figures that seem to call to her.
“The artwork fills in my life right now. It’s a facet of who I am, and yet it is really a lifestyle choice. It’s more than what a person does. It’s part of who I choose to be,” she said.