Preface and Chapter 10: May 2004

PREFACE TO MOM THE ARTIST, PART TWO

This blog is Part Two of two. The first blog, "Mom the Artist," should be read first and is at http//momtheartist.blogspot.com. It presents my mother Nancy Howard's artwork, in images and commentary, up until April of 2004. These earlier works, most done when she was in her 70's, are full of sun, magic, and vitality, and I highly recommend them to you at the earlier blog.

This current blog continues the story for the last one and a half years of her life, ages 85-87, when her health was declining. But she was at least as prolific as before. Her art took highly original if sometimes darker turns, which I am privileged to share with you. These latter works, some of them, are Mom's gift to the world, as an art historian said at Mom's memorial service.

Read the first blog for instructions on how to navigate these blogs. Remember, you can get a larger view of the images that are wider than they are tall by clicking on the image. The artworks themselves, as opposed to the images, are mostly of two sizes. When Mom did her "pen and inks" outside, she almost always used 5.5 by 8.5 inch sketchbooks. The only exceptions are in Chapter 19, when she used a 9 by 12 inch sketchbook. For her work indoors, watercolors and acrylics, she used mostly 8.5 by 11 or 9 by 12 inch sketchbooks. The only exception here is the acrylic in Chapter 16, which was 10 by 14.

In my text, the numbers and letters in parentheses are for reference purposes. The numbers originally corresponded to the chapter numbers, but then for the blog I had to amalgamate some chapters, as explained in the first blog. I saw no reason to renumber everything.

CHAPTER 10: MAY 2004

On Easter Sunday, 2004, my sister Cathy and her husband Karl took Mom around Mt. Hood on a drive. On the way down she became disoriented and confused. Her speech stopped making sense. They took her to the hospital in Hood River, where they said she had had a stroke. A CT scan or two later, the nature of the stroke was clearer: it affected the left hemisphere, and mainly the parts of the brain involving speech. At the least, Mom’s verbal communication ability, both to and from others, was impaired.

Moreover, one of her carotid arteries—the main arteries in the neck—was 100% blocked, and the other 80%. She underwent an operation to clear the partially blocked one—it was too late for the other. Afterwards, she recovered in the Marquis Care Center in Oregon City. Almost immediately she wanted her sketchbook and a pen. She was going to sketch the portraits of the people she encountered there. She gave many of the originals to the people she sketched, but I made copies on the care center’s copy machine.

The first one (12a) is of Al, a stroke victim who lived at the facility. He knew Mom’s husband John from the paper mill where they both had worked. His wife Bernice, (12b) visited him every day for a few hours. She was full of energy and life, in contrast to her husband, who was either depressed or less responsive to his environment due to the stroke. The sketch of the two together (12c) makes the contrast clear.









Another sketch of Bernice has her in the garden, by the fence, with her back to us—-a pose characteristic of Mom’s style even before the stroke (12d).



There was a truck driver named Jim in the facility, recovering from a burst appendix. 2000 miles from his Detroit home, he looked lonely and impatient to get back. When he got the original of this sketch (12e) he brightened a little:



Mom drew other long-term residents (12f-g). She was not after a pretty picture. She was after truth, a truth she was fearful of becoming herself. In the slides so far in this chapter, have you ever seen this subject taken up in this way before?






I seem to detect not merely a blank or downcast look in these portraits, but a shining spirit underneath. Mom was not just drawing appearances, but the soul.

She also sketched her speech therapist, a perky young woman who visited two or three times a week (12h):



For some reason, Mom drew her without a face. Perhaps she couldn't see the young woman's soul. Mom was not fond of the employees at Marquis Care Center. For one thing, the aides kept giving her “soft” meals even after the dietician changed the order to “mechanical soft,” a more appetizing proposition. They corrected themselves when family was there to support her protest.

Mom’s sketching turned away from people—a depressing and scary subject at this point—to other living things. There was a dog named Mitch. I don’t know whose it was, but he was very cute and vied with Jim for the couch (12i):



Then there were the flowers that people sent to her room, which she sketched in a Matisse-like way (12j):



There was also the garden, full of life (12k):



One plant was particularly attractive; its leaves shot upwards and out like the jets of a fountain, full of the vitality Mom wanted to get back (12l):



To give an idea what she was drawing, here is a photo of my wife Ela and me in the garden, taken by Mom (12m):



In her second week at the Marquis, Mom felt up to trying color. Sketching the garden in color was a real picker-upper. Again the focus is the larger-than-life fountain-like plant, now flaming with inner vitality like a bonfire (12n-o).






And of course people still brought her flowers (12p):



By the end of the second week, Mom was ready to go, although not yet in a position to live independently. I have a photo of her toward the end of that second week, hopeful but also somewhat scared of the future (12q):

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.

Chapter 12: early autumn 2005

Mom continued painting leaves into the fall. They were easy to bring into the class at Rose Villa and take off with, with her imaginative and stimulating backgrounds (14a):



She actually pushed her compositional ideas a little further. The effect is to inundate us with color (14b):



Another example is the one below (14c). She called it another "Fantasie Japonica," although I see nothing Japanese in this monstrous plant:



Later in the month she backed off these extremes and contented herself with seasonal images. She included pears, a typical autumn fruit, with her leaves; they appear to be rustling across the page (14d).



She did another version of this same idea as a Halloween card. Once it was done, my brother Steve e-mailed it out to family just in time. I remember being with her that class. She wanted something besides leaves. So I trudged over to the Treasure House, just across the hall actually, and brought some little things they had—gourds, mostly. She picked out a little plastic Jack O’Lantern to put in her painting (14e). She wanted the painting to signify Holloween. (Remember, she had had a couple of stroke. She had aphasia, difficulty in verbal communication. It was hard for her to say the right words, especially about something she was planning, an idea in her head like art for Holloweeen.)



The Rose Villa Holloween Party came a few days later. The staff and some of the residents had on costumes, and there were prizes for the best one. Mom’s contribution was to sketch the people around her. One was Susan Lehr, in marketing (14f).



Another was resident Ruth Mulkey (14g).



A third was "Billie" McMurkey (14h). Mom amazed us in never forgetting someone’s name, even at the end.



And of course she had to do me (Slide 14i). I should add that the sketches don’t look all that much like the people they are of. They are more caricatures than portraits; Mom called them “cartoons.”



All was not totally fun that Holloween, however. Mom would start doing something in fun and then scare herself out of her wits. In her class at the Milwaukie Senior Center, she drew her idea of a scary monster. But it scared her so much that she ripped it up and threw it in the trash. She told me about it, and I immediately wanted to see it for myself. We fished around in the trash, got some tape, and taped him back together (14j). We both had a good laugh after that.



Another time, I took Mom to the other side of the Willamette, Lake Oswego, to do some sketching. It was a warm October afternoon, and she had a nice time, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake. On the way back, I wanted to look at a small park and boat landing directly opposite Rose Villa. We had seen it often when I took Mom down to the river close to her apartment, at River Villa Park. Mom didn’t think it was a good idea. I said it would only take a minute. We stopped, and I got out of the car to look more closely. Suddenly the sprinkler in the lawn started up, getting me a little wet. Mom was terrified. We couldn’t get back soon enough. She explained that the house next door was haunted. She’d looked at it closely; nobody ever came there, it was really spooky. She did some eerie drawings of houses on the other side of the river. The first one below (14k) has "haunted house" and "10/18/05" written on the back (14k). We never went to that area again!

Chapter 13: November 2005

Thanks to Mom's long-term care insurance, she had caregivers 6 hrs a day. She would get them to take her places to sketch. One caregiver had a horse in Canby, south of Oregon City, and she’d take Mom to feed it. Going back they would sometimes stop at Willamette Falls. One sketch from September (15a) shows a tranquil scene, with trees and the hills beyond. The squiggly lines suggest a feeling of airiness, like we might just spiral up into the trees. The Falls aren’t even pictured. Actually, the only way I would guess it was there is from the title on the back. It could just as well be Clackamette Park, at the mouth of the Clackamas.



In November the rains came, and the Willamette was moving faster. Mom did a series of sketches progressively abstracting from the scene, to convey the energy of the water. The first one (15b) is just a study of the shape of the place, and the water flowing over and through that shape. If solid is masculine and fluid feminine, as we have seen in her portraits (Chapter 6), then this study is rather masculine. In her second and third versions that changes. In the second (15c), churning mists of water start to take over. By the third version (15d) there is almost nothing solid left, not even the bluff on which the viewer is standing, just swirls and lines.









Mom’s favorite place continued to be the two sides of the Clackamas River where it joins the Willamette. In September and October the boats were still out, and Mom enjoyed drawing them as they zoomed along. One contrasts the stillness of the bank with the speed of the boat (15e). Another one simplifies and focuses intensely on the speed (15f). Her husband had had such a boat and occasionally enjoyed revving the throttle. (The color change on the right side has to do with the scanner, not the artist.)






Autumn is of course when the leaves change color and thin out, exposing the bare branches. Mom loved painting the process. Here the upper branches appear bare, while the lower ones are still lush (15g):



Several sketches try to abstract from a row of trees, probably on the other side of the Clackamas. don’t think it really works. I include an example that I don't think really works (15h), to show how much trial and error it took to produce something magical.



However it all comes together in a watercolor version of the same kind of scene, whether of the same trees or not, which became the illustration for November on the calendar (15i).



Once that November, I took a photo with Mom’s camera while she was sketching on the south side of the Clackamas (15j). Mom chose that scene as the subject of her Thanksgiving card, which we dutifully and joyfully sent out to family and friends (15k). The view is from the south side of the Clackamas.