Grandma Moses Paintings Now at the Dayton Art Institute

Tom and I celebrated our fifty-fourth anniverary by going out to eat and then to the art museum to see American Sampler, Grandma Moses and the Handicraft Tradition.

Both of us enjoyed the show.  Tom had never seen crewelwork and was impressed by the beautiful pictures Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961)  made with worsted wool.  One crewelwork picture is on the cover of the flyer advertising the exhibit.  I scanned both the front and back so you can read about some of the upcoming special events associated with the exhibit.  Click to enlarge.

 Both of us enjoyed the farm scenes she painted. Tom was raised in the country and though I was raised in what would now be called a suburb, I had many aunts and uncles who lived on farms.  Every time we visited the farms, I did things I never did at home...played in the cornfields, jumped off the loft into mounds of straw. When I was six I even fell into a fresh cow pie.  I expect you know another name for cow pie.

Grandma Moses didn't begin painting until her hands were too gnarled to sew.  She used housepaint in the beginning and whatever she could find that she could paint on.  One of her first projects was painting on her wall because she ran out of wallpaper.  She was fond of using glitter on her winter scenes to give the snow the effect of sun shining on it.

I had a hard time deciding what to buy in the gift shop as a memento of the visit.  Even now I'm thinking, "If I go back, I'll buy the children's book with a spring poem by Robert Frost and pictures by Grandma Moses."  What I bought was a children's book about Grandma Moses.  I have about a dozen other books in this series.  They are inexpensive, have nice reproductions of the artist's work and give a brief overview of the artist and his or her work.  There are amusing cartoons to accompany the text as well. One of her paintings is on the cover. Click to enlarge.  These books are written and illustrated by Mike Venezia.

In the hall leading to the exhibit hall there were "thread paintings by Mary Borkowski, a Dayton folk art painter.  These were mostly silk embroidery on silk.  They are very different from Grandma Moses crewelwork but are still considered folk art because Mary Borkowski was untrained in the fine arts and had a unique vision just as Grandma Moses did.

The last section of the American Sampler exhibit includes text that explains how some of the embroidery stitches are made.  It also includes samplers made by young children and women  who used the samplers to decide what stitches to use for future sewing projects.  The samplers are another example of folk art.

The exhibit will be in Dayton until February 21, 2016.  I hope you live close enough to visit it.

Georgia O'Keeffe, a Review of Three Books

Georgia O'Keeffe's  painting, Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu,  was reproduced in  one of my grade school reading books.  It was my favorite of the paintings  in that book.

I have always remembered the vertical composition, the colorful cliffs and the "slit" down through the center of the vertical.  It was the smooth gradual variation of vivid color that appealed to me.  That smooth gradual variations of color  that were so much a part of much of her work are still part of what draws me to her paintings.

I began looking for Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.  Mostly, I found them in art museums Tom and I visited.  Somewhere I came across a book of her paintings in full color  in a large format book...Georgia O'Keeffe, A Studio Book, published by The Viking Press.  The book was first printed in 1976.  The copy I have is from the third printing in 1981.  Georgia O'Keeffe wrote the commentary for the paintings.

Twenty plus years ago, I was pleased when the Quality Paperback Book Club offered Georgia O'Keeffe, a biography written by Roxana Robinson in 1989. When the book arrived,  I opened it up with anticipation.  But I put the book aside after I bogged down reading about her ancestry.  I know forebears are the typical beginning of most biographies but I was reading for pleasure and the details about her ancestors were not my primary interest.

A month ago my sister loaned me The Spirit Catchers by Kathleen Kudlinski, copyright 2004 and published by Watson-Guptill Publications.  The book is part of Art Encounters, a series for young adults.  In this novel,  a fifteen year old boy meets Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico in the summer in the 1930s.  She befriends him and teaches him photography.  In return, he cleans her brushes and helps her with other tasks around her adobe dwelling.  Part of the story is concerned with Georgia O'Keeffe's painting, Ram's Skull with Brown Leaves, which is reproduced on the cover.

This book sent me back for another try at the Georgia O'Keeffe biography.   The book is a thick one, over five hundred pages.  There is a lot of information so there were times when I had to set it aside for a day or two so I could absorb what I had read up to that point.  She lived to be ninety-eight and had an active life for most of that time.  This time I read, looking forward to the time that would correspond with the young adult novel.

 Robinson does a good job of describing paintings Georgia was producing so I could look through the Viking Press book and find many of the paintings.  The three books provided a rounded picture, Georgia O'Keeffe as seen from different viewpoints.

She associated with many  well known artists and photographers so I learned a bit about Arthur Dove and John Marin, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter as well as a lot about her photographer husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

Her strong will, strong opinions,  and deep commitment to her art are obvious in all three books.  It appealed to me that she believed in taking care of this earth long before "being green" and "leaving a small footprint" were  the popular messages they are today.

Earth Colors by Sarah Andrews, a Book Review

I read a lot of mysteries.  Sometimes, in the winter when the weather is bad, I will read as many as eight in a month.  Usually I get the books from the local library and that is where I found Earth Colors by Sarah Andrews.  I liked this book so much that I bought two copies, one for myself and one for my daughter who has a masters in geology.The mystery revolves around a Remington painting.  Is the painting authentic or a copy?   The sleuth is Em Hansen, a geologist looking for a subject for her master's thesis.

What, I , as a mystery reader, really want is a good entanglement where right triumphs over wrong in a few hundred pages.  Mysteries are an escape for me from the entanglements of real life where motives and solutions only evolve over years of a person's lifetime.  And Sarah Andrews provides this escape, along with interesting and believable characters, some of whom appear over and over in the series.

What makes this book different from most  mysteries is not only the amount of information Sarah Andrews incorporates about geology in general but also the history of pigments and their relationship to the geology of  Pennsylvania which she explores as the mystery progresses. Being an artist, I found that history  interesting as well as the information about analyzing those pigments which Em Hansen learns.

Sarah Andrew's thoughts on environmental issues are always interesting to me, too, and come up in other books of this series.  One of her characters in this book, Jenny, said something that impressed me so much I added it to my little book of inspiration to live by.

Jenny and Em, the geologist, are discussing how Jenny is able to maintain a happy attitude when she loses battles to preserve significant features of the landscape.  Jenny tells Em about the chestnut tree blight  that  destroyed all the chestnut trees in the eastern United States many years ago. There are still very old stumps sending up new sprouts.  The sprouts die when they reach a flowering age because the blight kills them.  These are wonderful trees, extremely rot resistant.  A person can still find barns and homes built with chestnut lumber.  Scientists have been working for years to find a way to counteract the blight.

Jenny tells Em,  "Nothing lasts forever in this world, not even blight.  So I think I'll just honor my roots and keep on sending up my sprouts."

Gretchen and Ray's Art Deco Wedding

Everything was Art Deco and Trains...

from the invitation with its railroad-like logo which Gretchen and Ray designed

...to the location, The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal

...to the Departure Board where the table assignments were on baggage tickets

...to the tables decorated in silver, black, and white with ostrich feathers and a silky runner and a photograph of a classic locomotive, a different photo at each table.

...to Swingtime, a band with the big band sound of the 30s who played the romantic classics of the time.

Many of the guests wore outfits from The Drama Workshop costume collection and others wore clothing similar to the 1930s styles.

All of the couple's children were part of the wedding party. During the dinner one table of guests burst into song...a chorus of the theme from The Brady Bunch.

Gretchen's son

Gretchen's daughter

Ray's older boys

Ray's youngest son

One of their friends designed a special poster to place at the entrance to the Private Dining Rooms.

One last picture of Gretchen and Ray...