Chapter 14: Winter color, 2005-6
As winter set in, Mom was enjoying her art classes at Rose Villa and the Milwaukie Art Center. One day she painted huge, colorful butterflies (16a, 16b):
Another day, she painted brightly colored peppers in weird shapes (16c):
For the fun of it, she painted a grossly fat bird (16d):
One day she painted the class itself, listening to the teacher (16e):
In my view, she was dissatisfied with being there. She always painted according to her own dictates anyway, and now she was away from where her muses wanted her to be. She needed to be where with was life and energy, not techniques to relearn, at Milwaukie Senior Center, or photographs from magazines to improvize from, at Rose Villa. She tried painting the surging currents of the winter floodwaters, but it didn’t work very well (16f)L
She was also taking a class in how to paint with acrylics at that time (she was taking two classes at the Milwaukie Senior Center and one at Rose Villa!). For weeks, all she brought home were messes on paper. One day I think they were supposed to paint folds in a piece of fabric. She did tolerably well (16g):
A friend of mine remarked that turned upside down, this one looked like the inside of a cave. In fact she did draw something, in crayon, that she called “The Cave” (16h):
I didn’t understand this painting for a long time. Perhaps I still don’t. It looks almost cubist in its angles and lines. But I have a theory. The art classroom at Rose Villa is situated in a windowless room on the lower floor of the only two story building there. The figure is sitting at a desk or table, leaning on a cane with one hand while the other is propped up by the table, next to a thermos of coffee. The scene is either in that room at Rose Villa, or elsewhere on that same floor, in which daylight shines in only through one end of a long hallway.
Mom went to class less and less, and asked her caregivers more and more to go to the river, despite the cold, the rain, and the gloom. And what was at the river? Let us turn to her “pen and inks,” as she called them, from that period.
Another day, she painted brightly colored peppers in weird shapes (16c):
For the fun of it, she painted a grossly fat bird (16d):
One day she painted the class itself, listening to the teacher (16e):
In my view, she was dissatisfied with being there. She always painted according to her own dictates anyway, and now she was away from where her muses wanted her to be. She needed to be where with was life and energy, not techniques to relearn, at Milwaukie Senior Center, or photographs from magazines to improvize from, at Rose Villa. She tried painting the surging currents of the winter floodwaters, but it didn’t work very well (16f)L
She was also taking a class in how to paint with acrylics at that time (she was taking two classes at the Milwaukie Senior Center and one at Rose Villa!). For weeks, all she brought home were messes on paper. One day I think they were supposed to paint folds in a piece of fabric. She did tolerably well (16g):
A friend of mine remarked that turned upside down, this one looked like the inside of a cave. In fact she did draw something, in crayon, that she called “The Cave” (16h):
I didn’t understand this painting for a long time. Perhaps I still don’t. It looks almost cubist in its angles and lines. But I have a theory. The art classroom at Rose Villa is situated in a windowless room on the lower floor of the only two story building there. The figure is sitting at a desk or table, leaning on a cane with one hand while the other is propped up by the table, next to a thermos of coffee. The scene is either in that room at Rose Villa, or elsewhere on that same floor, in which daylight shines in only through one end of a long hallway.
Mom went to class less and less, and asked her caregivers more and more to go to the river, despite the cold, the rain, and the gloom. And what was at the river? Let us turn to her “pen and inks,” as she called them, from that period.
posted by Michael S Howard at 10:48 AM
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