Art “just poured out of” Diana Vavra, said Hugh Grant, curator of Denver’s Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art.
Vavra, a master printmaker, lithographer and art instructor, died at a Denver care facility July 24 after a 17-year battle with cancer. She was 68.
No service is planned.
Works of Vavra’s, as well as those of her late mother and father, Kathleen and Frank Vavra, are on display at the Kirkland Museum.
Diana Vavra was prolific in her art and broad in her artistic interests.
She worked with embossed intaglio – etching with embossing, pure etching, stone lithography, woodcuts and engraving, Grant said.
Vavra’s work was on display at the 1960 painting and sculpture exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the 1970 exhibition of women artists at the same museum.
She painted on canvas, drew with ink and pencil, enameled copper and made jewelry, furniture and many of her own clothes.
One of her furniture pieces was a small table made of marble, stone and glass.
She continued her artwork despite repeated bouts with cancer. Vavra’s outlook on life was “never give up,” said her son, Shaun Vavra Hall of Denver.
After bouncing back from yet another round of chemotherapy treatments, she would call Grant and say, “I’m up. I’m at it,” he said.
In 2006, when Grant assembled an exhibition of work by the Vavra family – Frank, Kathleen and Diana – he didn’t imagine Diana Vavra would be able to attend the opening.
Five minutes before the event started, she struggled into the Kirkland with the help of her son. The display continues through Sept. 10.
“She was remarkable,” said Shaun Hall, who is a metalsmith and plans to pursue an art career.
Vavra often had emphemeral images, such as seashells, in her work, saying such images seem to come and go.
“They are there an instant and then they are gone, back out to sea,” she said. “In the world there are things that we try to hold onto and mostly we can’t.”
Diana Vavra was born in Denver on Sept. 27, 1938, earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and a master’s in fine arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
She taught drawing and printmaking at CU.
Vavra’s father was a nationally known American Impressionist and her mother did watercolors and designed fashion advertisements for Denver’s best-known department stores.
Vavra’s only survivor is her son.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
