Figuratively Speaking - Grandma

8"x10"

This was painted from a photo taken 42 years ago.  I can easily pull up that number because it was an important year for me.  The baby is my oldest son, my first born.  It was taken at Thanksgiving so he was 6 weeks old.  He was a big baby, well over 9 pounds.  We make them big in our family.  The lady in the photo is his grandmother.  What a beautiful lady she was.  She loved kids and nature and was truly kind.  I am writing this about her in past tense because she just passed.  Painting this was good therapy, but hard to do.  I really wanted to capture her likeness and her personality.  That Thanksgiving was both unusual and special.  We were hippies.  My son was born at home.  We hosted my husband's family and many of them came, including his Uncle Chuck and his 3 boys, and his sisters.  We were not shy about our hippy ways including being vegetarian and smoking pot.  The family was amazingly cool about the whole thing.  We had a wonderful time and I really remember the closeness I felt with his family and all our hippy friends who came to celebrate with us.  We will miss you Joan.  Thank you for loving my children, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.

Figuratively Speaking - Memories of Joan

Our family got really exciting and happy news this week.  We also got really sad news.  We were and still are, on an emotional merry-go-round.  The painting above is one I did from memory of my backyard. It reminds me however of my mother-in-law, from my first marriage,  who passed away.  She lived on a beautiful piece of property in Michigan and loved to be out in the woods or on the pond more than anything.  I am inserting a wonderfully written and heart felt response one of her granddaughters, Claire Wood,  posted on Facebook. 

"My grandma, Joan Davis, passed away this weekend. She was the strongest person I have ever known. I have been writing down my memories of her because I don’t want to ever forget how unique she was.

As a young girl during the depression, she owned two dresses and slept on the porch of a two-room cabin. She and her siblings canoed across a lake to get to a one-room schoolhouse each day. She learned to forage for berries and other edible plants from her mother, something she did her whole life. I will always remember when she made watercress sandwiches straight from her creek.

She loved learning. She graduated from school early and went on to college at 15 or 16, rare for a woman in those days. She became a teacher and later a school psychologist.

She raised six children, on her own part of the time. She went through her share of hard times in life, but she was resilient and a survivor. She lived alone on 80 acres for 40+ years, chopping her own wood well into her eighties. She savored her solitude, and loved nothing more than spending all day outside in the woods."