Linda Calahan

Linda was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, back, she says with a smile, "when you could buy a house for $3,000." Linda's family moved to Spokane when she was at a young age. So "in" to drawing and painting was Linda, that at the age of ten she had rounded up some of the neighborhood kids who had been clamoring for her help, and began giving them art lessons! As for Linda's formal art instruction, oil and pastel classes drew her to enroll for study in her early twenties. She emigrated to Canada and attended the Fine Arts program at Kwantlen College in Vancouver for two years. Linda discovered her favorite medium after she enrolled in watercolor classes at UBC in 1996. Since that time, she has studied under well known Vancouver artists Brenmt Heighton, Joyce Kamikura, and Amanda Jones, and North Idaho artists Katherine Haynes, Barb Janus, and more recently, internationally known artists such as Zolton Szabo and Joe Fettingis. Linda's watercolors have won awards in British Columbia and Arizona. Her paintings are displayed at the Village Art Gallery in Yuma. Linda and her husband Gary Pharness, also an artist, display their art at their own Sweet Pea Studio located in their home in Wynndel, B. C. "I hope that through my art, people will see the world as colorfully as I do," Linda says.