Pawling, meanwhile, painted a portrait of a man and woman embracing. “That feeling of being supported is just about the best feeling in the world,” she said, noting the people whose images she incorporated into the piece were the group’s chauffeur and its facilitator, a young woman named Olga whom the artists considered “our Julie-from-‘The-Love-Boat.’ “

As they worked, passersby stopped to see what they were doing and refused to let any language barriers get in the way, with parents sometimes asking a question through their English-speaking youngsters.

Watching all the give-and-take in the atrium of the mall was the person who made the symposium happen and, incidentally, also built the mall. Mete Bora is honorary president of Summa, an international construction business he founded in 1989 in Ankara, Turkey.

“Mete was in the middle, sipping his espresso and smiling,” Pawling said. “He’s a true patron of the arts.”

Now that Bora has turned the running of the business over to his sons, he has more time to spend promoting the arts, said Scott Linde, owner of the Pittston-based Linde Corp., which supplies excavation equipment for Summa’s construction projects around the world.

“They’ve adopted me since 1997,” Linde said, explaining how he feels as if he’s part of Bora’s family.

Just about every year since 2004, Linde said, the Summa Group has sponsored a gathering of artists called SummArt. In 2005 he helped arrange for the symposium to take place at Wilkes University, where Cosgrove is an associate professor of art. She and Pawling, who has a studio in Dallas, participated in SummArt for the first time then. When they were invited back this year — as the only two Americans in a group that included people from Turkey, Romania and Moldova — they were excited to experience a different country and culture.

Anyone who happened to read “The Geography of Bliss,” which made the New York Times Best Sellers List in 2008, might remember globe-trotting author Eric Weiner describing Moldova as the least happy country on the planet.

But the local artists viewed Moldova through a different lens as they met happy, curious onlookers at the mall and toured breath-taking landscapes in the countryside. Rounding out the trip were tours of wineries and a cliff-side church and a meeting with children in folk costumes who danced and sang and were eager to sweep the visitors into the games.

Their daily dinners were candlelit feasts, which Bora intended as a time when the exchange of artistic ideas could continue.

“The value of art in one’s life may be difficult to quantify but is impossible to deny,” Bora wrote earlier this week in an email from Istanbul. “I fully agree with (Italian philosopher) Benedetto Croce that importance of art is related to the nature of human-built environment.

“I take a great pleasure sparing a considerable portion of my life for art,” Bora added.

Cosgrove and Pawling are grateful to him, and to Linde, who helped make their trip to Moldova possible.

“I’m not done with it yet. The next phase of sponsoring is to go to the auction,” said Linde, who plans to help sell the artwork in Moldova, where it will raise money for art education.

The auction date has not been finalized yet, but it could be your chance to bid on Cosgrove’s butterflies, or Pawling’s embracing couple, which she covered with a series of numbers 1 to 44, to represent the years she has lived.

“Many of my works deal with time and the changes that occur in all life — the blooming and the decay — and the continuation of spirit,” she said, explaining the numbers. “After all, everything is temporary.”

to read more on the Artists’ Summer Camp and see more photographs of their work, go to this page:

http://lindeco.com/linde-sends-local-artists-to-international-art-campus-in-moldova/