Pacific School of Dance was founded in Coos Bay 19 years ago, born of a compulsion to provide top quality dance education to young people.

Today, the school’s 170 students commit themselves to the discipline of classes several times each week, throughout a nine-month school year. Staffed by seven instructors, the curriculum ranges from classical ballet through tap, jazz and contemporary dance.

Each spring, the dance year ends with a bang — a fully produced recital at Marshfield Auditorium, free to the public. Last year, drums and dancing camels highlighted the recital’s theme: “African Safari.”

This year, the show takes dancers within an art museum, where paintings spring to life and thieves are foiled as they attempt to steal an Impressionist masterpiece, “Water Lilies – 1908” by Claude Monet.

Pivotal to the plot is the painting, which is being replicated for the show by Coos Bay artist Virginia Z. Gourley.

Sole proprietor of Prime Finishes, Gourley has been painting for more than 25 years. She has concentrated, since 1990, on custom interior painting throughout Oregon and California. Growing up in Chicago, Gourley was both a student and a frequent visitor of The Art Institute, home to a collection of Monet’s drawings, prints, and oil paintings. “Water Lilies, 1906” may have been the first of the 250-painting “Nympheas” (water lily) series she viewed, but surely “Water Lilies – 1908” has received her most careful scrutiny. “I love his palette of colors,” she says, “and what’s interesting is, I subscribe to The Artist’s Magazine and what did they have this month? His palette.”

The April 2008 issue of The Artist’s Magazine features a story titled “Palettes of the Masters,” offering suggestions about which colors today best replicate the pigments that were used by Rembrandt, Monet, and Morisot.

“It’s been so nice to have his colors right there,” says Gourley. “I’ve been able to achieve more the authentic colors, due to somebody else’s research ... The article recommends colors to substitute. Some of the blues were easy to find: cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean. I’m using only 10 to 12 different colors.”

And the canvas is shaping up to look very, very much like an original oil painting by Claude Monet. Gourley’s “Water Lilies – 1908” will have the thick, slightly blended look of an Impressionist’s wet-into-wet painting, a technique that developed when artists took some of the 19th century’s newly invented pigments and went outside to paint — using natural light and a revolutionary approach to color. By working a painting before any layer of paint has dried, Gourley delivers a water-like illusion, mixing wet oils directly on the canvas. Her “Water Lilies – 1908” features the same spring-green floating leaves as Monet’s original, and rich, butter-yellow blossoms. The painting’s water is a deep cobalt blue, topped by the delicate mass of white and purple lilies.

“It feels so careless and free,” Gourley says of Monet’s style, “and yet each color defines where he was looking. In some ways it has a quality of movement.”

Which is just about perfect for a dance production.

Gourley’s reproduction of Monet’s painting will include his name in the lower right corner. Her signature will appear below his. The original, 36-by-35-inch oil painting is held in private collection, Japan.

The dance school is offering “Water Lilies – 1908” (following its two appearances onstage), as the prize of a drawing. One hundred raffle tickets are now on sale for $25 each.

Ten years ago, Sotheby’s of London brought down the gavel on Monet’s “Waterlily Pond and Path by the Water,” one of six the artist had made of his water garden in Giverny in 1900. The painting sold for an astonishing $33 million to a buyer who wished both name and nationality to remain anonymous.

Gourley’s framed version of “Water Lilies – 1908” could be yours for ten bucks. But not if it’s my raffle ticket that’s drawn on June 1.

To view the painting or purchase your chance, visit Pacific School of Dance at 303 D St. in Eastside, or call 269-7163. If your service club or organization would like the painting presented to the membership, with opportunity to purchase raffle tickets, contact PSD or Art World at malbert@uci.net.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.