The easel in Iris Beaumont’s living room faces a picture window, and the window faces Homan’s Pond. This arrangement was not accidental.
“I had the house built in 2001,” Beaumont says, “and I told the contractor: I want the window in this room to be exactly centered on the pond. Not the general area of the pond. Exactly centered. He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.”
Beaumont, 67, retired from teaching art at Willow Creek K-8 School in 2014 after 34 years in the classroom. Her living room, which doubles as her studio, contains everything she needs: the easel, a drafting table, shelves of Winsor & Newton watercolor tubes arranged by colour, and a filing cabinet containing more than 200 completed works — most of them studies of the pond that has been the subject of her life’s most sustained artistic project.
The series, which she calls “Ice-Out Studies,” began in 1992 with a single painting: the pond on the day the ice broke that year. She had been painting casually for years, but something about that particular painting — the quality of the light on the fractured ice, the way the open water reflected a March sky — made her want to do it again the next year. And the year after that.
“At first it was just the ice-out itself,” she says, pulling a sheet of watercolor paper from a flat file. “I wanted to capture that moment when the pond goes from solid to not. But I realized very quickly that you can’t paint the ice-out in isolation. You have to understand the pond in August, in October, in January. So I started painting the pond in every month. And then I started painting it in the same month across different years. And then I had a project.”
The result is a body of work that the Willow Creek Free Public Library is currently exhibiting — 24 watercolors spanning 1992 to 2025, arranged chronologically. The exhibition, organized by librarian Doris Kim, opened last weekend to a crowd that filled the library’s main reading room.
“It was overwhelming,” Beaumont says. “I’ve spent so many years alone in this room, painting, that I forgot what it feels like to have people look at the finished work. They were quiet. Which is the best compliment you can give a painter.”
Librarian Doris Kim sees the collection as more than art. “Iris’s paintings are a scientific record,” Kim said in remarks at the opening reception. “The ice in the 1992 painting is thick and blue-white. The ice in the 2025 painting is thinner, grayer, breaking up earlier. You can see climate change in the colour of the water.”
Beaumont is measured on the subject. “I paint what I see,” she says. “I don’t paint to prove a point. But I’m not surprised that a thirty-year record of a single body of water shows changes. The pond has changed. I’ve changed. Everything changes.”
Before picking up watercolor, Beaumont spent more than three decades teaching the next generation of Willow Creek children how to mix paint, shape clay, and see the world as something worth rendering. She remembers every class, she says, but one stands out.
“The year I taught Amos Homan’s daughter — Ruth. She was maybe twelve. She painted the pond from memory. It was completely wrong — the colour was off, the shape was wrong — but it was alive. You could feel the wind in it. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.”
Beaumont says she has no plans to stop painting. “The Ice-Out Studies” will continue as long as she can hold a brush. She is also experimenting with a new series — portraits of the people who live around the pond, including Amos Homan himself, though she has not yet asked him to sit.
“He would probably say yes,” she says with a smile. “But he would want to know what I’m going to do with the painting. And I’d have to tell him I don’t know yet. And that would bother him. Some people don’t like loose ends.”
She looks out the window at the pond, which is flat and still under a late-May sun.
“I’ve never had a problem with loose ends. The loose ends are where the next painting comes from.”