St. John Rescue invites the community to participate in a special fun, fundraising event in conjunction with well-known St. John artist, Janet Cook-Rutnik, who is offering a painting of hers for a raffle.
A donation of $100 will give you a chance to win a $10,000 painting by the artist. This painting, entitled “Persephone Call Your Mother,” is an acrylic on canvas, 4 ft. x 4 ft.
No more than 100 tickets will be sold. The winner does not have to be present to win, and the painting can be rolled and mailed to the States at the winner’s expense.
The drawing is planned for a cocktail party at the Rescue Center on Gifft Hill Road on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. The holiday cocktail party will feature food, drinks, and other surprises.
All Art Raffle ticket holders are invited free of charge; others are asked to make a $50 donation to St. John Rescue, the lifesaving organization that has served the St. John community since the 1990s.
The painting will be on display on Tuesday on the Second Floor of The Marketplace in Cruz Bay from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. St. John Rescue members will be on hand to sell raffle tickets and share information about their services.
For more information about the painting see below. For more info about the artist, visit her website: janetcookrutnik.com
This painting is one of Cook-Rutnik’s Caribbean Goddesses series that references the stories of Greek and Egyptian mythology, of Demeter and Persephone, which are immortal and transcend chronology, as do all great stories about the transforming power of love, life, and death. This is the eternal stuff of life, of people, shared through stories that are passed on and embellished as each generation, each millennium, reinterprets and adds to the texture of the romance, the tragedy, the triumphs of daily life as embodied in these iconic stories of the mother’s loss of the daughter as she transforms from a girl into a woman with her own passion and power.
The artist sums up this lighthearted painting, “PERSEPHONE CALL YOUR MOTHER,” as follows: Demeter was bereft at the loss of her daughter and flew up to Olympus to demand that Zeus return her beloved daughter. Zeus tried to placate her, telling her, “Oh, she will be fine … Hades will take good care of her …” The next day, when Zeus looked out on the world, he saw the death and destruction in nature caused by Demeter, who was in charge of fertility, flowers, crops, etc. He then realized this was serious, so he called Demeter back and said, “All right, look, if she hasn’t eaten anything, she can return.” He sent his messenger, the god Hermes, to bring Persephone back. No sooner had he landed than Persephone had just eaten six pomegranate seeds secretly, as she was starving but trying to hold out. It was decided that she could return to Demeter for six months of the year and go back for the other six. Thus, we have six months of winter.
Checks can be made out to St. John Rescue with Art Raffle noted on the bottom and mailed to: PO Box 1225, St. John, VI 00831
For PayPal: St. John Rescue, Inc.
For Venmo – @Janet-Cook-Rutnik
For more information about St. John Rescue, click here.
