TRAVERSE CITY — If this year's Women's Winter Tour poster looks vaguely familiar, it's probably because you've seen it before. Sort of.
The poster is a take-off on French painter Georges Seurat's La Grande Jatte, which depicts an 1880s Sunday promenade on an island in the River Seine. Only instead of button shoes, the woman with the parasol is wearing ... huh? ... cross-country skis.
"I always try to do a poster that is iconic of a certain period, something you can look at and say, 'Oh, that's a Picasso, or a Matisse or a Toulouse-Lautrec,'" said artist and tour founder Kaye Krapohl, who has tapped into all three painters in creating artwork for the Super Bowl Weekend women's ski and snowshoe event. "I try to do it in a style everybody knows. You don't have to be an art history major to say, 'Oh, that's kind of cool.'"
Initially the light-hearted posters were a way to publicize the tour, now in its 14th year of celebrating women, winter and chocolate, and something fun for Krapohl to do, she said. But soon they and their offshoots — event T-shirts, notecards and buttons — became so popular that women began to anticipate and collect them.
"Women were taking posters down as I was putting them up, because there weren't a lot of women's events then," said Krapohl, a Vasa ski champion known for her efforts to get more women in the area involved in the Nordic sport.
The images are painted or hand-drawn, then scanned into a computer and re-created in an illustration program. All feature ski- or snowshoe-clad women from Gibson girls to Geisha girls.
"It's a trip through time," said Susan Riley, of Arizona, a former Traverse City resident and one-time tour participant who orders T-shirts every year for herself, her sister in Colorado and her daughter in Ann Arbor. "Sometimes she'll channel one of the masters, sometimes she'll channel a period, like the '60s and the Peter Max-ish one. It's not just a random piece of art.
"Every year you look forward to, 'What in the world she going to do next? How is she going to top herself?'"
Krapohl has a bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking and graphic design from the University of Michigan and studied printmaking at London's Slade School of Art. She was the 2010 Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Artist-in-Residence and won the Hallmark National Gold Medal and National Endowment for the Arts and Governor's Resident Artist awards among others.
She rendered this year's tour image in Seurat's pointillism style by manipulating images from the original painting and adding a few of her own. She re-painted electronic snow in the style of the painting.
"Her image this year is too adorable," said Todd McMillen of McMillen's Custom Framing, which occasionally gets the posters to frame. "She's done some crazy ones."
Krapohl said the sale of tour merchandise helps offset the costs of putting on the tour, which has raised more than $70,000 for the Traverse City women's shelter Madeleine's House and other local charities since 1999. It also gets women excited about art, winter and chocolate, three of her loves, and helps promote the message that women are beautiful — no matter their body type.
"Skiing is very democratic. It doesn't care what shape or size you are," she said, acknowledging that her non-athletic curves once made her self-conscious. "I feel that art always celebrates women's bodies, no matter what shape or size they are. I just like art and I like sharing it, and I want people to think you don't have to be a super athlete to have fun."
Krapohl said she sells up to 100 of the hand-signed posters a year all over the country — and not just to women. A man in North Carolina is a regular customer.
Buttons, notecards and T-shirts are bigger sellers.
"Everyone has their favorites and everyone likes them for different reasons," she said, adding that she's partial to the Geisha, Egyptian and Wonder Woman themes. "They all remind me of different years: That's the year it didn't snow and we had to hike, or that was the blizzard year. It's like vacation postcards."
The 11-by-17-inch posters and other tour merchandise are available at Brick Wheels, by email at wintertourmi@gmail.com, by phone at 929-7775, or online through March at www.womenswintertour.snowshoedart.com (click on the Girl Goodies link). Larger sizes are available by special request.
See more of Krapohl's art, including paintings and "body prints," at the City Opera House Feb. 1-29.
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