Primitives by Helen Ford Wallace 

Helen Ford Wallace picked up a paintbrush in 1997 to paint a flower scene to fill a space on her wall. She has always enjoyed and collected landscape paintings, but her background is in journalism and was not originally in art. She was The Oklahoman newspaper’s social columnist for more than 50 years, covering Oklahoma City’s party scene and highlighting community events in her print column, Parties, Etc., for most of them. Early in her career she wrote a gardening column called “Blossom Corner,” so flowers have interested her for decades and are part of her current work.

Helen also hosted Parties Extra!, a weekly party-related webcast featuring community leaders for 15 years for NewsOK and wrote a Parties Extra! Blog, a podcast for several years and contributed to social media platforms for The Oklahoman. For her webcasts, Trochta’s Flowers always provided the floral centerpieces for her studio table, and she photographed them and used the photos to create some of her primitive flower artwork.

She retired from The Oklahoman and covering parties each week, but she remains a weekly columnist as one of the writers for its generational 20-40-60 Etiquette column.

Helen paints in a colorful, elementary style and has painted numerous stylized bouquets of flowers, usually using bouquets that someone sent her or photos of flower bouquets from Oklahoma City events as inspiration. She has studied art with Chris Morel, a noted landscape artist from New Mexico, and, in June 2024, with Sonja Terpening, a National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Prix de West artist.

Helen is a member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame. The University of Oklahoma honored her with the Regents Alumni Award in 2021, and OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication honored her as one of its distinguished alumni in 2023. When Helen retired from The Oklahoman 2021, her friends and members of the community raised more than $90,000 for an endowed scholarship fund in her name for OU’s Gaylord College, where the rotunda there is now named the “Helen Rotunda.” They also dedicated a bench to her in the college’s garden. But more importantly, Helen’s legacy of community journalism, which began in 1957 when she started writing for The Oklahoma City Times’ teen page in 1957, is being passed on to the next generation of students. Her scholarship goes to select journalism students who are interested in highlighting community through journalism. And Helen is now showcasing beauty in the community and in nature in a different way –  through her colorful primitive art.