Artist Statement:
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Ona is a retired Assistant Head of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Art Department, book illustrator, member, Board member and secretary of Philadelphia’s Da Vinci Art Alliance (DVAA), and member of Philadelphia’s Art in City Hall Exhibitions Advisory Committee. Encouraged by doing drawings for library exhibits, she took evening illustration classes at the former Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts. She illustrated the first edition of Stories We Brought With Us, a textbook of folktales from foreign countries for adults learning English as a second language, published by Prentice-Hall, for which she drew the cover and sixty-one drawings. In her drawings she tries to capture the essence of a subject in terms of line, composition and color, employing her own calligraphy as an integral part of the overall design.

Bio:

Ona Kalstein is the illustrator of the First Edition of Stories We Brought With Us; Beginning Reader for ESL (Prentice-Hall, 1986), for which she did the cover and sixty-one drawings.  She studied children’s book illustration under Carolyn Croll at the Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts. She received her B.A. in Liberal Arts from Temple University in 1966 and M.S. in L.S. from Drexel University in 1967. She is the former Assistant Head of the Art Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Central Library, retired in 2004. She has been a member of  Philadelphia’s Da Vinci Art Alliance since 2007, Board Member since 2008, Secretary since 2014. One of her drawings was in Art in City Hall’s “Likeable Art” show in 2008, and she has been a member of its Exhibitions Advisory Committee since then. She has also served as a  juror for various AICH exhibitions. She continues to exhibit her drawings in Da Vinci Art Alliance members’ and other shows. Her work, including her popular caricature portraits, is also in private collections. In her drawings, she attempts to capture a subject’s essence in terms of line, color, composition and humor, often employing her own calligraphy as an integral part of the overall design. She works in ink and colored pencils on vellum.