Gloria Lindquist’s latest artistic venture has been building tin people. A collection of them hang in her carport.
Gloria Lindquist laughs while giving a tour of the many projects she’s built at her home in Battle Ground. Pictured here is a one-room, walk-in chapel.
Last spring Gloria Lindquist began building tin people. She’d never taken on such an endeavor before and didn’t have any particular blueprint.
But like the lifetime of projects before, Lindquist didn’t hesitate at the thought of being inexperienced. She simply had a creative idea and acted. Lindquist said her willingness to continue trying and learning new things has kept her active and happy at 87.
She lives on the property her and her late husband bought in Battle Ground in 1990, with her three cats, two of which are named Yankee and Doodle.
Lindquist’s visitors may find it hard to focus on the tin people, though. Her apartment is surrounded by a variety of her other creative endeavors. Homemade bird houses hang in various places. A small mock-village, a one-room chapel, a one-room schoolhouse and an old outhouse have been built in the backyard. The walls of her apartment are lined with oil paintings.
Lindquist has always been a free-thinking artist and revels in her youthful creativity. She’s never stuck to one medium — the rhyme or reason was never important. Finding an artistic outlet was all she wanted.
“I don’t know how to act my age,” she said. “I’ve never been this old before.”
At age 8 she started a newspaper in her neighborhood with pictures she’d drawn, and around that same time, she began painting small plastic molds that her father would sell at the bar he worked at.
She bought a camera and darkroom equipment from her brother at age 12 and soon sold her first photo to the newspaper for $1. This evolved into a 20-year career in journalism as a photographer, reporter and columnist.
In the 90s after a spontaneous trip to Battle Ground Lake for a picnic while visiting the area, she came to a house just as a “sale” sign was being hammered down in front of it and decided to take a look.
While touring the house, Lindquist looked out across the countryside from one of its many views and imagined sitting there to write a book — she was sold.
She still hasn’t written the book — she said she plans to write it “when she gets old.”
After Lindquist’s husband died in 2014, she continued to rely heavily on her creative endeavors to keep her mind and body busy while coping with the loss.
“You can’t go backward, so keep happy and move forward — every moment is precious,” she said, and later added, “time moves on and we have to move along with it.”
Her creative endeavors stretched to tin people last April when she decided to make something of an old chicken feeder and ice cream maker.
She built a tin person and named her “Miss Perky Pot” and liked the result, so she began to scrounge for more scraps. Soon, her friends began collecting material as well, and she began to build a nest egg of tin material. Given the ideal size of the can for a tin person’s arm, she’s been drinking a lot of pineapple juice lately.
“I call myself Miss Franken-can,” she said.
Her first public appearance came at the Art in the Garden show at NatureScaping Wildlife Botanical Gardens in Brush Prairie — she sold over 20 and made about $600.
