Centralia Artist Brings Joy to Families Through Hand-Painted Ornaments

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When Cindy Wortman-Ziel was a mother raising a newborn and toddler in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she needed a diversion and some extra money to pay her babysitter.

She was living in St. Thomas at the time, one of the most popular cruise ship destinations in the Carribean with around 1.5 million visitors per year. So she found a job working at Diane Artware studio, an ornament-painting business that catered to cruise-ship vacationers. She had little experience painting.  Most of her knowledge of art came from Northwest Coast Native art wood carving while living in Alaska in high school. She eventually strayed away from that type of art after not seeing a way to make a viable living from it.

“Because I’m non-Native, it didn’t feel like I had room to go far with that,” Wortman-Ziel said. “There were a lot of barriers. Culturally, those crests belong to the people.”

After working for the art studio on St. Thomas island for a time, Wortman-Ziel began thinking of shifting from whimsical, tropical landscapes to putting Alaskan patterns on the ornaments. In 2006, she broke into the wholesale market in Alaska, shipping her hand-painted ornaments to businesses for a couple years before moving back to Alaska.

After five years of selling her ornaments, doubling her volume each year, she moved to Centralia to take care of her elderly, ailing mother who died three years ago. She’s still in Centralia and has been selling her ornaments for 15 years now, with designs that include a whale leaping out of the water with a mountain in the background, a fishing vessel in front of an orange sunset and the Northern Lights.

Christmas ornaments are one of the top-selling categories in the gift and souvenir market, she said, and those Alaskan sceneries are targeted toward appealing to summer cruise-ship visitors in Alaska. She often travels to two or three Christmas shows each year to showcase her artwork and sell her ornaments.

“A lot of people choose Christmas ornaments as their souvenir items,” Wortman-Ziel said. “Every year they get pulled out and those memories get re-lived.”

This year has been a struggle for her business, which she has been selling an average of 3,000 ornaments each of the past 10 years. The COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to nearly all cruise ships, which is 95 percent of Wortman-Ziel’s business. 

From February to March 2020 alone, COVID-19 outbreaks associated with three cruise ship voyages caused more than 800 cases, including 10 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When cruise ships began cancelling trips in mid-March, Wortman-Ziel had thousands of already-painted ornaments ready to ship to Alaskan gift shops that were calling her and saying they weren’t going to open.



“That was just pulled out from under me,” Wortman-Ziel said. “It just went almost completely away.”

She has a couple year-round shops she sells to that were making small orders, which is encouraging that people were still buying her ornaments in some capacity. Even then, she realized she needed to switch to online sales and marketing. 

Being 58 years old, Wortman-Ziel is on the wrong end of the digital divide, she admits. She has had an Etsy page since 2009, where she sells her ornaments and various artwork, but that had plateaued by 2020. 

Her new website, fineartornaments.com, is more fleshed out, has a gallery of her items with detailed information and allows customers to make online purchases.

Each ornament is hand-painted and Wortman-Ziel paints each of them in stages. She’ll put an entire set of empty ones in front of her and, for instance, paint the water on each one at the same time, followed by the trees on each one and so forth.

“I call it real, authentic art,” Wortman-Ziel said. “They’re originals; not one-of-a-kind originals, because I do a lot of the same kind. But any two ornaments, you can pick up and turn and see it’s different. Each one is arranged in its own unique way.”

Creating something that lasts has been fulfilling for Wortman-Ziel, who used to work in high-end catering in St. Thomas. She started off as a dishwasher and graduated to a garde manger, which is the person responsible for the food presentation. She designed the garnishes and assembled the hors d’oeuvres and appetizers.

“I really loved working with food, but after a while I also started feeling it was so transient,” Wortman-Ziel said. “It doesn’t last. I like the temporal quality of that; of making something and then it goes away, but food was a little too temporal.”

Luckily for her, that careful attention to detail translated over to her painting. Now it allows her artwork to be gifted from one family member to the next and then hang on Christmas trees all around the world. It’s a rewarding feeling, she said.

“I got a lot of satisfaction from being a part of that,” Wortman-Ziel said. “To me, I like to think this little thing I created is just a vehicle for carrying someone’s special memories or honoring a special relationship. That makes me even happier.”

Wortman-Ziel has a brick-and-mortar studio on Main Street in Centralia, called Cindy’s Red Door Studio, where she plans to host painting classes and other events in the future. She won’t be keeping regular hours but will be open for drop-in customers to buy ornaments as well.

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Reporter Eric Trent can be reached at etrent@chronline.com. Visit chronline.com/business for more coverage of local businesses.