Elaine Green
Freda Elaine Burton Green was born in April 1928, just before the onset of the Great Depression. Her mother was a renaissance woman and educator. Her father was an entrepreneur who owned his own bakery at the age of 18 and during the Depression moved to California to work in the Hunts factory. It was his ketchup recipe that was used for years. At an early age Elaine exhibited a love for the fine arts, standing on benches in the playground singing or giving dramatic readings.
Her family moved to California when she was 7 years old and there she was exposed to opera and music productions in San Francisco, studied modern dance and participated in a workshop with Martha Graham, and endured and matured during the Great Depression.
When she was 17, her parents bought a farm in northwest Arkansas. She followed a bit later to attend the College of the Ozarks (now the University of the Ozarks) where she honed her skills in art, drama, music and met her future husband. Between her freshman and sophomore year, she worked at NASA to save money for college. For her senior recital she sang the lead role in Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley, designed and built the set, and directed it, skills she would use 40 years later when she would director the Arkansas River Valley Children’s Theater and design and build the sets for the summer productions.
Elaine taught public school music for one year. That same year, she and her beloved Roland Green married. It was 1951. He was a Purple Heart WWII war veteran, music education major and soon to be ordained pastor. A year later they started their family while Roland was in graduate school. They raised their five children in Alabama and Arkansas where Roland taught high school choral music, speech and debate, and pastored a church.
At the age of 40, Elaine returned to college to obtain her degree in Art Education and taught art in the public school system for 24 years. She had found what she was truly wired to do and a passion she shared with her youngest child, Julia Green Calloway.
She has dabbled in every medium except for computer graphics but has done plenty of “old school” by hand graphic art. She loved working in clay, could get lost in watercolor, but also had an affinity for tempera. You will find a variety of mediums in her artwork, which is primarily still life.
At age 96, Elaine currently resides in a retirement center in Arkansas where she has been crowned the Valentine Queen, represented her center in a district pageant, and stays busy creating decorations for her hall door and delightful birthday cards to gift her seven (soon to be 8) great-grandchildren. Art is truly one of her love languages.
Julia Kathleen Green Calloway
Born in Birmingham, Alabama and reared in Dardanelle, Arkansas, Julia Kathleen Green Calloway is the youngest of five brought into this world by Roland and Elaine Green.
As a child Calloway’s “happy places” were playing games with her father, playing the piano, creating any kind of visual art (often with her mother), singing, spending as much time as possible outside in nature and with just about any animal that had less than eight legs, and laughing out loud! And as an adult not much has changed!
Calloway studied music performance and music education before acquiring her BA in Graphic Design. Several years later she completed a MAT with an emphasis in Art.
Calloway has always loved to travel in the states and overseas. She used to keep a partially packed suitcase on “go” mode as one of her motto’s was “have passport, will travel”!
Calloway was an exchange student for one year in Australia. As an exchange student she recognized the importance of understanding she was there to experience and become a part of the culture in which she was living, while carefully balancing sharing the culture she came from.
For seven years Calloway was the assistant director and “dorm mom” for students who participated in a summer Spanish language and immersion program in Spain. These students received college credit for the courses they took. Calloway also made sure the students soaked up as much of the Spanish culture and history as they could locally and through various trips provided throughout their stay. It truly became another home for Calloway as she developed close relationships with many of the locals over time.
For over twenty years Calloway was an Arts Enrichment and Education Specialist for Head Start preschool programs. She had the privilege of training teachers and sharing ways to tap into the wealth of children through all avenues of the Arts, statewide, regionally, and nationally. She believes imagination, curiosity, and creativity are three of the most important qualities we can help develop in children and hope never to lose as adults.
Today Calloway and her husband own a small horse ranch where they breed, raise, break/educate, train and race quarter horses and thoroughbreds. She now spends her days managing the ranch and working with the horses. She has been amazed to discover how much young children and horses parallel each other in their attention span and learning process. Like young children, horses need rules, boundaries, and consistency. And most definitely, a healthy relationship with their handler built on trust nurtured through love, guidance, and patience. Do this for them and they will give you their whole heart without reservation.
Julia Green Calloway, "Tiger", graphite pencil, watercolor
Elaine Green, "Memories on a Chair", tempera
