Chapter 11: Summer watercolors 2005
During 2004, Mom eventually went back to her farm and lived independently, with calls from family every day to check on her. Due to her stroke, she couldn’t drive. She took cabs into Oregon City to visit the Senior Center. She continued to sing in their chorus and at Atkinson Memorial Church. She went to doctor appointments with family accompanying her. She worked on getting her driver’s license back.
I have not been able to identify artwork specifically from that year. Perhaps as I go through her work again, I will. I know she went to watercolor classes. But for now we will pick up her work after she moved in Rose Villa in June of 2005. Before that, in December of 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In preparation for an operation to remove the cancer, she was taken off her blood-thinning medication, which kept clots from forming, She quickly had another stroke, this time affecting a little of both hemispheres of her brain. So in April of 2005 she had a double operation, one for the cancer and another on her carotid artery again. This time the rehabilitation time was even longer. It was clear even to her that she had to move into a retirement community. She had already chosen Rose Villa as where she wanted to go, so in May and June we moved her from the farm where she had been for 38 years to a 2 bedroom apartment at Rose Villa, in Milwaukie 3-4 miles north of Oregon City. Some member of the family, perhaps it was me, took a photo of her playing her piano while the rest of us were hauling things all around (13a):
Her apartment at Rose Villa had an extra-large living room, which accomodated her piano, and a second bedroom for her art. Once settled in, she enrolled in a couple of watercolor classes, one at the Milwaukie Senior Center, where she had already been going, and a new one at Rose Villa itself. She was happy to get back to her art, and she plunged right in.
One Rose Villa resident later recalled the first time she saw her at the Rose Villa class. She herself was a beginner in watercolors and proceeded very slowly. Here was this little old lady in class for the first time. She could only talk in a whisper, making her hard understand, but she seemed to know what she was doing with watercolors. Mom went to work and in 15 or 20 minutes had a painting our beginner couldn’t imagine doing herself (13b, I think, was her first). Then Mom proceeded to do another, even more beautiful than the first (13c). She was making an awesome first impression.
For Mom, her art was the way people at Rose Villa would get to know her. She could only talk in a whisper, thanks to her second throat operation, and even then often did not get the right words out. She wanted people to know she wasn’t an Alzheimer’s patient just yet. So she’d show her art to people, and if they liked it she often just gave it to them, on condition that they display it. I don’t think we have the original for the second one above, for example (13c). As quickly as I could, I scanned her work on her computer. Then I made copies so she could show them and give them to friends. Below are two more examples (13d-e):
More experimental is a Cezanne-like still life (13f):
She entered this one in an art contest, probably because it was the most recent thing she’d done that she liked.. It didn’t win anything, although it was displayed for a while at Rose Villa.
With similar colors are a couple of baskets that Mom painted. One is straightforward enough (11g):
The other one, however, adds a touch of mystery with its snake- or rope-like plant weaving up from inside (11h):
She also continued with pastels and was back to her favorite spot, where the Clackamas joined with the Willamette River. It was fishing season; in this sketch, the I-205 bridge is visible in the background (13i).
Later I had the idea of putting Mom’s best Rose Villa paintings together in a calendar, so relatives could have a piece of her art. All the works in this chapter up to now are in the calendar (January through June) except for two: the one of the bowl (11f), which seems to me to lack the immediate appeal needed in a calendar piece, and the snake-charmer's basket (11h), which I thought people would just find puzzling. The other basket (11g) was dubbed by her art instructor at Rose Villa as an "Easter basket," so it adorned April, the month Easter fell in that year.
Another watercolor that appeared in the calendar is a graceful leaf on an imaginative, effervescent background. She called it "Fantasie Japonica" (11j):
And here is another version of the same idea, less developed but with the same title (11k).
Like Van Gogh, Mom sometimes tried to paint in what she considered a Japanese manner, light, graceful, and with a delicate texture. Her model here was actually a close friend of hers, Akiko, whose careful study of a Japanese lake always was displayed as prominently as possible wherever she lived. Akiko was going back and forth to Japan when Mom was close to her, before her strokes, and she sometimes stayed at Mom’s house when first coming back from Japan. I remember Mom’s excitement at being able to e-mail her in Japan and get an answer back much faster than by regular mail.
For the August picture on the calendar, I wanted what I considered a marvelous watercolor of sunflowers she did that summer. Van Gogh had favored these plants, of course, and Mom had done her “dancing sunflowers” years earlier. This one shows her lifelong aim of absraction: We have here the very essence of sunflowerness (11l):
For some reason Mom did not want this picture on the calendar. Perhaps she thought it would not be understood and would be seen as crude and childish. We compromised on something she actually did that fall, but which could be seen as a late summer scene. It was a boat, dock, and lodge on a New England lake (11n). She probably used a photo in a magazine for her inspiration. But Mom said she had seen just such things on her visits East, to daughter-in-law Louise’s family home in New Hampshire.
I have not been able to identify artwork specifically from that year. Perhaps as I go through her work again, I will. I know she went to watercolor classes. But for now we will pick up her work after she moved in Rose Villa in June of 2005. Before that, in December of 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In preparation for an operation to remove the cancer, she was taken off her blood-thinning medication, which kept clots from forming, She quickly had another stroke, this time affecting a little of both hemispheres of her brain. So in April of 2005 she had a double operation, one for the cancer and another on her carotid artery again. This time the rehabilitation time was even longer. It was clear even to her that she had to move into a retirement community. She had already chosen Rose Villa as where she wanted to go, so in May and June we moved her from the farm where she had been for 38 years to a 2 bedroom apartment at Rose Villa, in Milwaukie 3-4 miles north of Oregon City. Some member of the family, perhaps it was me, took a photo of her playing her piano while the rest of us were hauling things all around (13a):
Her apartment at Rose Villa had an extra-large living room, which accomodated her piano, and a second bedroom for her art. Once settled in, she enrolled in a couple of watercolor classes, one at the Milwaukie Senior Center, where she had already been going, and a new one at Rose Villa itself. She was happy to get back to her art, and she plunged right in.
One Rose Villa resident later recalled the first time she saw her at the Rose Villa class. She herself was a beginner in watercolors and proceeded very slowly. Here was this little old lady in class for the first time. She could only talk in a whisper, making her hard understand, but she seemed to know what she was doing with watercolors. Mom went to work and in 15 or 20 minutes had a painting our beginner couldn’t imagine doing herself (13b, I think, was her first). Then Mom proceeded to do another, even more beautiful than the first (13c). She was making an awesome first impression.
For Mom, her art was the way people at Rose Villa would get to know her. She could only talk in a whisper, thanks to her second throat operation, and even then often did not get the right words out. She wanted people to know she wasn’t an Alzheimer’s patient just yet. So she’d show her art to people, and if they liked it she often just gave it to them, on condition that they display it. I don’t think we have the original for the second one above, for example (13c). As quickly as I could, I scanned her work on her computer. Then I made copies so she could show them and give them to friends. Below are two more examples (13d-e):
More experimental is a Cezanne-like still life (13f):
She entered this one in an art contest, probably because it was the most recent thing she’d done that she liked.. It didn’t win anything, although it was displayed for a while at Rose Villa.
With similar colors are a couple of baskets that Mom painted. One is straightforward enough (11g):
The other one, however, adds a touch of mystery with its snake- or rope-like plant weaving up from inside (11h):
She also continued with pastels and was back to her favorite spot, where the Clackamas joined with the Willamette River. It was fishing season; in this sketch, the I-205 bridge is visible in the background (13i).
Later I had the idea of putting Mom’s best Rose Villa paintings together in a calendar, so relatives could have a piece of her art. All the works in this chapter up to now are in the calendar (January through June) except for two: the one of the bowl (11f), which seems to me to lack the immediate appeal needed in a calendar piece, and the snake-charmer's basket (11h), which I thought people would just find puzzling. The other basket (11g) was dubbed by her art instructor at Rose Villa as an "Easter basket," so it adorned April, the month Easter fell in that year.
Another watercolor that appeared in the calendar is a graceful leaf on an imaginative, effervescent background. She called it "Fantasie Japonica" (11j):
And here is another version of the same idea, less developed but with the same title (11k).
Like Van Gogh, Mom sometimes tried to paint in what she considered a Japanese manner, light, graceful, and with a delicate texture. Her model here was actually a close friend of hers, Akiko, whose careful study of a Japanese lake always was displayed as prominently as possible wherever she lived. Akiko was going back and forth to Japan when Mom was close to her, before her strokes, and she sometimes stayed at Mom’s house when first coming back from Japan. I remember Mom’s excitement at being able to e-mail her in Japan and get an answer back much faster than by regular mail.
For the August picture on the calendar, I wanted what I considered a marvelous watercolor of sunflowers she did that summer. Van Gogh had favored these plants, of course, and Mom had done her “dancing sunflowers” years earlier. This one shows her lifelong aim of absraction: We have here the very essence of sunflowerness (11l):
For some reason Mom did not want this picture on the calendar. Perhaps she thought it would not be understood and would be seen as crude and childish. We compromised on something she actually did that fall, but which could be seen as a late summer scene. It was a boat, dock, and lodge on a New England lake (11n). She probably used a photo in a magazine for her inspiration. But Mom said she had seen just such things on her visits East, to daughter-in-law Louise’s family home in New Hampshire.
posted by Michael S Howard at 11:35 AM
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