Day 10- My mother's art

My mother has sketched all of her life and took up painting sometime in the 1970s. No matter what she ever has tried, she excels, whether it's interior decorating, international cooking, beautiful tablescapes for wonderful dinner parties, clothing (with OR without a pattern), or anything that brings visual pleasure. 

This is my mother's usual style, which I love:

Pictures taken during her world travels turned into paintings that make me want to jump into them and have a coffee. Greek coffee, of course. And maybe a dessert sticky with honey.

Or maybe just pack a picnic basket and go hiking out in this field near some mountains, wherever the heck it is. That's the thing about her style. Her choice of colors are always perfect for the scene, just the way her choices for colors in the homes she created were perfect. We didn't move much, it's just that she created a new and different home as the years went by and all of them were exquisite.

                                                                     I can't do that

                                                         I thought I couldn't paint either.
                                                  So I didn't try until less than 3 years ago

The picture below is a recent journal page I've already posted, and I'm still learning things that she seems to do instinctively, but notice how I seem to have remembered this particular color pallete after seeing it in her home year after year!

That picture of some wonderful landscape still hangs in her home, along with many others that lift my heart. I think I've taken many pictures of her paintings so that I can "have" them, but they look even better in real life. I own that picture up at the top and 3 others I'll show you, but the it's the only one I have that is her "usual style".

                                          The very first painting I demanded to have was this one

This was the first one I ever saw that broke out of her pattern and it spoke to me. It has spoken to me over the last 30 or more years and said different things to me, but it has never really been quiet.

I know the sketch this painting grew out of. I watched her sketch this thistle and loved watching her confident pencil (charcoal pencil?) create it on paper so realistically that I thought the breeze might blow away the down of the flowerheads

 She was sitting outside in Oregon where she had come to visit me, and I now understand how her heart must have been breaking to see the way I was living. I was wandering in self chosen poverty of the kind her father had left Greece to avoid. In fact, I think my chosen poverty was lower than he had ever experienced in his boyhood and I did not understand at the time why my mother was so sad about my choices.

For her to come home and create such beauty out of a sketch done in that condition touches my heart now in a way that will never go away. She shrugged when I went nuts for this painting and said something like "I was just playing around" When I first saw the swirling, psychedelic color choices, my reaction was "trippy!" But now I see her creativity working to heal her. I hope it did. We don't talk about those days anymore.

                                              The next picture I fell in love with was this one

 She told me she was trying to draw Shaker chairs and the other stuff "just happened." I didn't understand that at the time either. But I saw a stairway twisting up to another trippy sky and a fantasy tree of creativity trying to burst through the floor. Click to enlarge it and you'll see what I mean. I made her sign it in Greek, and I wanted to tell her to let this creative spirit OUT! Let it run FREE! But I didn't say that. I was finally of an age that knew better than to presume to give advice to my mother. My arrogance from the days I lived in squalor and called it "freedom" was finally gone.

The picture below is mine now too. I saw it and asked for it and she once again told me in a puzzled voice that she wasn't sure what she had been trying to paint. To me, this one looks like someone lost in a mist and it breaks my heart.

                  Maybe it was a spirit EMRGING from a mist. That would make me feel better

Here's a picture of my mother from before I existed. I love the spirit of this young woman I never met!

Her worklife made her a part of history, she is a founding member of two Womens Studies programs at two different universities, she has traveled to most parts of the world (with my father and sometimes off on her own adventure) was a founding member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC and also of the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell MA. Her feminism was sparked, like many women of her generation, by the writings of Betty Friedan, and she put her money and words to work in support of women. Women losing out on opportunities through our society's structure or through their own limited thinking made her angry. She is indeed a champion.

I never caught on to why she collected books of art by women artists or why she pointed them out to me in our many trips to many art museums. But amidst the story of her remarkable life that had nothing to do with being "just a mother", was the saddest sentence I ever read.

                         "She wanted to be an artist, but chose to be a librarian for practical reasons. "

I never knew this about her. I wish she could have devoted as much time to being an artist as she had originally wanted. Her hands are magic and her visions are marvelous. She channeled her creativity in many directions, and it wasn't wasted. But I wish it could have been a bigger part of her life.

                              She's still on this planet and  still as sassy as she was in that picture above.

                                                                Look at this spirit!

                                                                     I love her