Helenka's art as colorful as her life

SALT LAKE CITY — A dozen years ago, Helen Bimstein decided to change her first name. She was already in her 80s, so she'd been Helen for a long time. But so what? It was time to be Helenka.

Perhaps re-invention is the secret to a long and eventful life. At 95, Helenka Bimstein has recently debuted her very first solo art show, which runs through the end of February at Artistic Framing Co./The Sugarhouse Gallery.

Although it's tempting to think of her as a 21st century Grandma Moses — who became famous as a painter late in life — Bimstein would prefer you didn't. She doesn't want to capitalize on her age and, in fact, only reveals it when her son, Salt Lake composer Phillip Bimstein, tells her she should. Frankly, she's not that fond of old people.

"Old people overdecorate," she explains. "And they have clutter." Maybe if they're artistic she might like them, she says. "Or if they aren't fat." Old people, she says, "let themselves go. They get flabby. … And they wear old-people clothes."

Bimstein is trim and fashionable, with red hair that sticks up in punk spikes. Her house is clutter-free, and everything in it seems placed just-so, including four purple glass bowls that stand in a kitchen window as if they were a still-life.

On every wall of her house, there are Helenka Bimstein paintings, although a few carry the signature "pour vous, Helène." This was during a brief period when she was more French.

Nearly all of these paintings have an ancient Egyptian theme, in a style Sugarhouse Gallery owner Scott Waters describes as expressive and colorful, with a childlike simplicity reminiscent of Picasso. Nearly all of her work evokes ancient Egypt, full of pyramids, pharaohs in profile, the single Eye of Horus.

She first discovered Egypt in Toledo, Ohio, where she grew up after her family emigrated from Poland. Her father left the family and moved back to Poland. Her mother told her she wasn't allowed to finish high school. "You're only good to have babies," her mother said.

"Shortly after that, I moved out," she says. She was 14. She moved to the YWCA, got a job as a waitress, visited art museums and eventually met a young traveling salesman who peddled encyclopedias. Later, she says, he became president of the Chicago company that published the New Standard Encyclopedia.

She took up painting at their summer house in Wisconsin when her husband and four young children watched TV. She thought TV was boring.

Bimstein is not afraid to just pick up and move. She came to Salt Lake City when she was 93; before that, she moved to Venice Beach, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., and Aspen, Colo.

She paints now on her kitchen table, under the watchful eye of her cat, Cleopatra. As soon as she finishes another painting, her son tells her to start a new one. "I've been ordered to paint constantly," she says.

Her one-woman show, "The Magnificent and Mysterious," will be a feature of the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll on Feb. 19.

Bimstein will also have a one-woman show of her art at the Jewish Community Center beginning March 1.

e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com