By Kelly Sanderbeck, Donor Engagement Manager
His medium is watercolor and his self-described obsession is detail. But the backstory of the unique, hand-painted lampshades at Paradise Inn all started when Dale Thompson was led to the national parks by his soon-to-be wife, Hannah. Both entered Valley City State Teachers College in North Dakota in the fall of 1950, but didn’t meet right away. Dale left after one quarter to join the Navy with an older brother and served four years during the Korean War. While he was in military service, Hannah taught in a one-room rural school near her hometown of Fort Ransom, ND. Fortunately, when Dale left the Navy, Hannah had returned to Valley City to complete her degree. They met as art students, fell in love and were married.
They moved to Ashland, OR to teach school after graduation, then left a year later when Dale received a graduate assistantship at Ohio State University where he was awarded a Master’s Degree in geography. After graduation, he taught school in Rugby, ND and Sheridan, WY. As with most teachers, Dale needed to find work during the summer seasons and Hannah steered him toward the National Park Service (NPS). While she was in college, Hannah had worked for the park concessionaire at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota for two summers. She suggested Dale apply for a summer ranger position there. After a couple of weeks on the job, he knew this was what he truly had been searching for. “And I owe it all to Hannah for introducing me to our great national parks.” Toward the end of his second summer at Mount Rushmore, he applied and received a full-time ranger position at Joshua Tree.
During his career with NPS, he served at Dinosaur National Monument (both Colorado and Utah sides), Lava Beds National Monument, Grand Canyon NP and Hawaii Volcanoes NP. He first headed to Mount Rainier in 1968 as Assistant Chief Naturalist while continuing to create and refine his art. He specializes in watercolors that are so highly-detailed they look like photos. In 1979 he returned to Mount Rainier for a second and final assignment as Chief Park Naturalist.
While at Mount Rainier, the park was exploring a new kind of management. “I was an ‘area manager’ who lived at Paradise, a mini-superintendent responsible for rangers and buildings.” But his passion for creating art never abated and he’d spend nights and weekends painting the nature he observed during the workweek. “It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know my subjects well by being a park ranger.” He drew, and continues to draw, his inspiration directly from nature. “Growing up, my eyes were always searching for creatures on the prairie. Every time we moved to a new place, I’d find a new community of plants and animals.”
When the opportunity arose, Dale took an early retirement from NPS in 1981 to seek another career as a full-time wildlife artist. “Life is all too brief, and I knew I had to get crackin’.” His artwork focuses on birds, mammals, plants, shrubs, trees and other living things that surround us in the world of nature. During his career, he painted wildlife calendars, illustrated books and exhibited in gallery and outdoor shows. He participated in the Pacific Rim Wildlife Art Show in the Tacoma Dome for eight years. In his work, he’d intersperse watercolor with gouache – an opaque watercolor with a matte finish — that fixes the colors and gives the artwork more permanence. “I wanted to use watercolors like famed wildlife artist Fenwick Lansdown. It’s a matter of how you handle the paint, to lend itself to detailed work. I used fine brushes and layering, sketching first from memory. I love the constant discovery when painting mammals, like the look of individual hairs and the tracts of feather on birds.”
A few years after his NPS retirement, he received a call from the Superintendent of Mount Rainier asking whether he might like to bid on a project to paint new floral lampshades for Paradise Inn. The original shades (with flowers painted from memory, during the winter, by wives of park employees!) had hung there for at least 50 years and were beginning to fall apart. One shade had been taken down, packaged securely, and sent to art conservators at the NPS Interpretive Design Center. They determined the shades were beyond repair and needed to be replaced. Dale entered the bidding process and was fortunate to be selected for the task of replacing the lampshades.
Paradise Inn is more than 100 years old and on the National Register of Historic Places. Thus, the new shades needed to be, if not duplicates of the original, at least replacements-in-kind. In the case of Paradise, that would be National Park Rustic or ‘Parkitecture’ style. They had to be made of the same heavy-gauge paper — in cylindrical form with sides woven together with raffia — and painted with tempera paints of flowers native to the park. “That was a huge challenge, as the paint – what you use in grade school — is not easy to use or mix the colors. I even got Hannah involved, as several of the shades are five feet tall and three feet in diameter! We had to put them together outside in the middle of winter…”
Over a period of four months in 1989, Dale painted the 64 floral lampshades that hang throughout the Inn’s lobby and dining room. “It is a huge honor and privilege to know that the shades I painted are now a part of the rustic furnishings of the venerable old Paradise Inn.” Dale tried to make sure that he had a representative sampling of low forest, sub alpine and alpine region flowers, all his choice. “I even made mini shades for the front desk, which are still there. Those were really a one-time labor of love that I won’t replicate, even though I get many requests!”
Park visitors love them. When the sun sets in the evening, the low-wattage bulbs in the shades create a warm, relaxing ambience. The simple, yet highly-detailed, illustrations of the flowers spur visitors to go out into the meadows during the brief blooming period of summer to see the flowers for themselves in their full glory. In this video, Dale tells the story of re-creating those lampshades, and you can see them in full color in Guide to the Lampshades of Paradise Inn, a booklet produced by WNPF and sold at the Paradise Gift Shop. Convinced that people hold a ‘memory of place,’ Dale is gratified to know that seeing the lampshades is an indelible experience imprinted on the memories of thousands of park visitors.
Several years ago, he received an invitation from Melinda Simpson, Operations Manager for park concessionaire Rainier Guest Services. They asked him to come up to Paradise Inn and paint on-site as an artist-in-residence for ‘Birdapalooza.’ For him, it was like returning to his second home. He painted North American songbirds at the Inn for one or two days a week for the next 10 years, and took great pleasure in sharing the story of the lampshades with overnight guests and other visitors to the Inn. To this day, Rainier Guest Services plays an important part in caring for the floral lampshades.
His most memorable experiences in the parks over the years were painting and leading bird walks. To this day, Dale and Hannah will be on a trail and overhear people wondering about a plant. “I’ll step in and tell them what it is… People are hungry and looking for knowledge. I did learn, though, not to use jargon as it is intimidating; I wanted folks to walk away feeling good that they’ve learned something.” He’s also really proud that all his kids are artistically talented. His daughter is a master gardener and does botanical work. His youngest son, Mark, was a park ranger in Alaska (now retired) and has an “incredible eye through a camera lens.” His work — including tiny, back-lit, plants — can be found on 500px.
Still looking for challenges, Dale now occasionally takes a break away from items in nature. “I have a fondness for old weathered and leaning buildings, where you can hear them audibly ‘sigh.’ I marry old farm buildings and fences with my interest in birds, seed pods, twisted wood and snags. There’s just as much beauty there as in a new green tree.” However, now at age 87, his eyesight no longer permits him to continue his detailed artwork. “The Lord gave me the opportunity to complete and share close to 1,500 paintings over the years. But all good things at some point come to an end.” He will continue for the rest of his life, though, to enjoy the fantastic natural worlds of the national parks, especially Mount Rainier. “One of my collectors is now returning some of the paintings, as I wanted the first option to buy back my best work!” If you’re lucky, you may very possibly meet Dale some day on the flower meadow trails of his home away from home in Paradise.