Orono and Hancock
Lois Main Templeton died on Nov. 7, 2018, with her family by her side. She was born to Dorothy Turner Main and John Smith Main on Jan. 16, 1928, in Madison, Wis. When she was 12 her father died, a loss that threaded through the rest of her life, not that you would know it unless you knew her well. Following a childhood in Wisconsin, she married Kenneth Stuart Templeton Jr. in 1947. As a family they lived for extended periods of time in Connecticut, California and Indianapolis, while returning repeatedly to spend summers on Hancock Point. Lois developed a love of abstract oil
painting, which enriched her life and the lives of others, both as a painter and a teacher. She relished bringing together people of disparate backgrounds and watching them form new bonds of friendship.
After graduating from Indiana University and Purdue University’s Herron School of Art and Design she taught there for several years while also working out of her own studio indowntown Indianapolis. Her paintings have hung in galleries and museums across the country and in 2011 she received the NUVO Cultural Lifetime Achievement Award. She wrote many poems, which informed much of her painting, and authored two books, “The Studio Book” and “Who Makes the Sun Rise.” In the spring and summer of 2018, the Indiana State Museum of Art featured a retrospective exhibition of her work. The Herron School of Art and Design has established a scholarship in her honor.
In 2011, Lois and Ken moved to Dirigo Pines in Orono, where she continued her work as a painter and a writer until the time of her death. Cancer took her with quick mercy. Until the last few months she was full of zest and “vigah,” as she liked to call it, remaining full of enthusiasm, curiosity and humor. She loved her family, music, her wide circle of friends, books, a story read aloud by firelight and the old cottage on Hancock Point where her heart was most at home. She leaves behind three children, Kenneth (and his wife,Nancy), John (wife, Emily) and Elizabeth, as well as seven grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. The Indianapolis art community held a memorial service in her honor in January and the family will gather in Madison next fall to inter her ashes and tell the stories she loved. We miss you, Mom.
“When will we burn the Great log?
The one over there there, unsplit, bearing the seasons.
Others burn down to marshmallow embers;
But the great log takes two men
To heave it into the flying sparks
And to tell the long story into the night.”
“Thoughts for a Tiny Book,” by Lois Main Templeton