Through the Gazette’s weather art program, local schoolchildren find artistic inspiration in the world around them – and a Northampton woman finds her own artistic inspiration from them.

Judy Van Heyst, 90, is a former art teacher who lives in Northampton with her husband Hans, 93, and their cat Honey. Judy’s paintings decorate their living room.

A few years ago, Van Heyst was inspired by the Gazette’s weather art program, in which local elementary school students can submit drawings and paintings of weather to be featured on the paper’s front page. She decided to honor and showcase that art in two collages — turning it into artwork of her own.

Each of Van Heyst’s framed collages features rows of weather art cutouts tiled on a blue background. To protect the children’s privacy, Van Heyst folded the artwork so that each artist’s name and school would not be visible. She displayed the final products in the Meeting House, a community center in her neighborhood.

Van Heyst appreciates that young artists aren’t limited by self-doubt. “A lot of artists say, ‘I can’t draw,’ but children, they don’t think about it that way,” she said. “You get them excited, and then they just draw.”

She pointed to a drawing in which a figure holds an umbrella that’s been blown inside-out.

“Here’s one — outstanding. The child is out in the rain and it’s windy. How many adults who are not artists would have the nerve to do something like that?”

Even so, she lamented that some people who would otherwise love to draw as adults were discouraged from doing so as kids: “A lot of times, people come to me and they say, ‘I like to draw, but when I was about 10, the teacher told me I wasn’t doing it [right], and I never drew again.’ Drawing shouldn’t be like that.”

Van Heyst hopes that more children will make weather art for the program, but she’s happy to see children use art to express themselves, in any case. As she wrote on the collages’ label card, paraphrasing a favorite quote: “Art reaches out where words fail.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.