Joyce Osika: Artist and volunteer

It's hard to put a box around Joyce Osika. At first glance she might appear to be foremost an artist. On further examining her life and work as a volunteer, serving others might appear to be her life's work.

Going back further into her history shines forth a person who was a nurse for many years and served in her country of England's military.

Early in the 1950s Osika was a member of Queen Elizabeth's Honor Guard in Lancaster. The Queen was a princess then. Later, shortly before she was married, Osika served in the British Territorial Army as a Med Tech.

She married her husband Miklos (Mik) Osika in 1951. Looking back, she recalls when he left Hungary walking across the Danube to escape communism. They came to America in 1953 on a ship named Liberty, landed in New York and took the train to the West Coast. They first moved to Portland to live near their close friend and sponsor, an American soldier named Charles Hawkins.

Osika worked for 28 years as a nurse. She also was an adjutant with Volunteers of America for nine years traveling across the country helping those in need. She innovated activity programs for the needy and used her membership in another volunteer organization called Loaves and Fishes to create a hot meal program. She used her nursing skills to develop a clinic.

The Osikas moved to Camp Sherman in 1977 and bought Twin View Resort. She became a volunteer for the Black Butte School (BBS) her first year here. Children were always of great interest, she says. Even as a young woman, her early career had been as a pediatric nurse in England.

"Art helps the students develop their academic skills because it stimulates certain areas of the brain. The art program also gives them a respite from the pressure of learning. Everything is not black and white, there's a little gray in there," she said.

Several of her students have written her saying, "thank you for letting me do art the way I want to do."

Osika teaches using many different media, including watercolors and pastels, and crafts for the younger kids. She teaches everything from impressionism to surrealism to pop art. Calligraphy has also been popular with the kids. And she teaches First Nation Art of the Canadian tribal people using multi-mediums of grasses and sand. She also teaches the aboriginal art of Australia. Both countries are frequent stops on her world travels.

Osika recalls when BBS students went to the 1986 World's Fair in Vancouver, BC. Thirty-four kids were on the bus.

As with all small schools on a budget, finding lodging for the big event was a challenge. One of their contacts was the well-known St. George's, a boarding school that looked like a castle and had once been a monastery. The school was on break at the time and leased their dorms in the summer; $80 per student per night was the going rate at the time.

Osika wrote to the school explaining how much BBS wanted their students to see the World's Fair, but the price for room and board was out of their range. St. George's wrote back to Principal Toni Foster stating their Board had decided to adopt BBS. Osika said they got the royal treatment including a five-course breakfast with orange juice served by the headmaster dressed in uniform.

Today, Osika teaches at BBS for 2-1/2 hours one day per week. The older students are working on perspective drawing. Next week they will be working on Mesopotamian art to coordinate with the school's other curriculum. Many of her students have gone on to win art awards and to careers in art. Bethany Benhower, now a Student Teacher of Art at Sisters Middle School wrote to Osika saying: "Thank you very much for giving me so many years of wonderful art lessons. You teaching me has opened a window of art for me."