MLN-Beldinaug28-14Cheryl Beldin, featured artist for September recently won an honorable mention for a piece of her pottery in a recent Mesquite Fine Art Gallery competition.

Cheryl is a Midwesterner from a group of towns called collectively, the Quint Cities (QCA).  The area consists of 5 big towns and numerous small towns located in Iowa and Illinois (on both sides of the same stretch of the Mississippi River and with a population of almost 500,000).  Even though she lived there over 50 years, she managed to visit over 50 countries on all the continents during her vacations.

As a child she showed both artistic skills such as embroidery and writing poems, as well as a love of mathematics and logic.  She first concentrated on her math and logic skills.   She got a BA in mathematics and then an MBA.  She retired in 2004 with 35 years of service with the Department of the Army.

In 2005, her family started to move away from the QCA as their parents died.  Since her sister just moved to Mesquite, she decided to join her. She moved in April 2006.

Cheryl always planned to concentrate on her artistic side after she retired.  In Mesquite, she started to learn about pottery and felt free to write poems.  Her first poem, written at age 17, was selected by the teachers to be published in their annual selection of the best work written by the students that year.  In 2012 and 2014, she received a red ribbon for second place in the Artist and Poet contest at the Mesquite Fine Arts Gallery.

Her pottery shows both that she loves cats and that she enjoys making people smile.  She took classes in slab, the wheel and sculpting. She always has new ideas of what she might like to do even if she needs to learn something more to do it. Many pieces are an unusually shape and/or have colors put on in unusually ways.  Some pieces, especially the cat ones, have a 4 line poem that goes with the piece. She never knows exactly what she will make as she starts each piece. All her pieces, both pottery and poetry, show her sense of humor and her love of seeing the funny side of life.