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.

Chair for Take a Seat Auction Completed

The chair is finished and delivered.  I took this photo with the freezer door in the background in hopes that the cream color of the chair would be more noticeable.  The color is called Golden Mushroom.  The paint is Semi-gloss Latex.

Here is the original chair.  In 1963, Tom and I bought it from a couple who had recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary and were in the process of downsizing.  At the time, Tom and I had been married a little over a year and were furnishing our first house.  Now we have passed fifty years of marriage so the chair is probably over a hundred years old.

Tom reglued a couple joints, rubbed it down with a deglosser, and applied two coats of spray primer.

Then I took over.  At this point I wrote a blog about the project.  FarSideofFifty suggested cream and deep red.  I had been thinking about using pale turquoise but when I went to the fabric store I kept returning to the two fabrics below.

I decided if I were decorating the chair for our living room, these colors would be my preference.  Thank you, Far Side.  I used the deep red to reupholster the seat pad and used the colors in the pattern as I created my design.

My original thought was to paint a causal design up the back and across the top.

I drew a lot of flower sketches from photographs Tom and I had taken.  I ran off copies in several sizes using the computer.  After trying a variety of designs, I decided that I preferred to have the design only across the top.

I also chose only two of the sketches that I had drawn.

Bleeding Hearts which I drew using this photo for ideas.

This photo is of one of the Asian Lilies in the driveway flowerbed.

The first time I put them together, I came up with this.

But this is the design on the chair.

These are my painting supplies.  When I bought the fabrics, I bought craft paints in what I thought were the "right" colors.  However when I began painting, I did a lot of mixing.  The various mixes are in the small covered plastic containers.  That's being a fussy artist.  The color can't be almost right, it has to be right.

The resulting chair is one that I would be willing to use in my house and that was my goal.

The chairs will be on display in various shops in downtown Tipp City in June and July.  In August, the chairs will be taken down.  They will be auctioned off on August 23.  The money raised will be divided between Tipp-Monroe Community Services and The Tipp City Area Arts Council.

Rocks to Agitators to No Agitators, Washing Machines

We bought this automatic washer a couple years ago when the last automatic washer died.  If I had known the old one was  an outdated antique, I would have opened the lid and taken a photo of the agitator inside.  The new washers don't have agitators.  They have a rotating tub.  The washer gets the clothes clean so I haven't bothered to figure out why.

As long as I can remember agitators were a part of top-loading washing machines.  They were a bit like a screw.  They rotated left, then right as the clothes were being washed.

I can remember that until I was four or five we had a washing machine  like the one below which I photographed at the Madison County Historical Museum in London, Ohio.  I don't remember all the details of operating it.  I do remember the soapy water was squeezed out of the clothes with the wringer.  The clothes were rinsed and then squeezed through the wringer again.

                      Madison County Historical Museum

There was a tub arrangement associated with the washer.  Someone reading this blog probably could tell me more about the whole system.

                        Madison County Historical Museum

When I was four, my twin sisters were born and shortly afterward, Dad bought an automatic washing machine, a great new invention.  It was a Bendix, with two inserts for the tub.  One was used if the machine was being used to wash clothes, the other if the machine was being used to wash dishes.

Tom's family didn't have indoor plumbing when he was four or five so his mother used an old way to wash clothes.  In the summer, this rack with a wringer in the middle  was placed outside close to the clothesline where the clothes were hung.  Tubs were placed on either side and filled with water, one tub with soapy water, one tub with rinse water.

We didn't see this in a museum but at the barber shop the last time Tom went to get his hair cut.  One of the barbers collects, buys and sells antiques. Here is a view of the wringer with the side benches folded up front and back.

                                                   Front view.

                                                           Side View

The patent on this model was given in 18?6.  I cannot read the third number.

Clothes were scrubbed on washboards.

                       Madison County Historical Museum

Washing clothes is much easier these days and I am thankful.

The Dollhouse at the Madison County Museum, London, Ohio

I have always been fascinated by miniatures...dollhouses, model railroads, the little rooms at the Chicago Museum of art.

These photos were taken while Tom and Chuck were waiting for Norieta and me in the van.  We had stopped for a quick visit at the Madison County Historical Museum so I could take photos of the washing machines exhibit.  That is a blog for another day.  When I returned from the annex where the washing machines were on display, Norieta and  I took "just a quick look" at a few other exhibits.

The volunteer who had taken me to the annex told us a little about the dollhouse as we looked at it.  The dollhouse was made for a little girl by her parents but when they showed it to her, she said she didn't like it.  Was she a tomboy or a very spoiled child?  Or was this dollhouse more of a display than something a child would feel comfortable playing with?

The house is a reproduction of the one the family lived in.  When the dollhouse was given to the museum , the only way it could be removed  from the room in which it was built was by taking out a window.

The little girl is now in her eighties and living in a nursing home.

The dollhouse has Plexiglas across it because there are many tiny objects which could be easily lost.  For that reason (and because I was snapping pictures quickly) you will see my reflection in some of them.  If you like miniatures, too, you will want to enlarge the following photos by clicking on them.  There are interesting details like chamberpots in the bedrooms.


First floor left to right....

                                     Library

                                     Parlor

 

                                     Stairwell

                                     Dining Room

                                     Kitchen

Second Floor...

                                     Nursery

                                   Pink  Canopied bed Bedroom

                                  White Canopied bed Bedroom

                                      Girl's Bedroom

Third Floor...

                                      Sun Porch
A photo of the house the dollhouse was modeled from sits on the porch.

                                    Music Room

                                     Sewing Room.
The desk and chair are against the railing of the stairwell which opens in this room.

                                     Boy's Bedroom

                                     Right side porch
A place to feed the birds.

Finishing the Yellow Waterlily

Yellow Waterlily...13.5 inches by 10.5 inches...watercolor

This is the way the painting looked in September.  I had matted, framed it and exhibited it a year earlier.  I was disappointed in the painting.  I had finished it at the last minute and it just didn't shine the way I wanted it to. 

This is the photo Tom took at Biltmore Estates in October of 2009 which was my reference photo.

The day was dreary and rainy and the flower was a bright spot.  I tried to make it brighter by strengthening the yellows but it still didn't pop out from the background.  This time I put several washes of Antwerp blue over the background and washed a little yellow into the area behind the lily.  I laid washes of Antwerp blue, Winsor green, New Gamboge, and Magenta mingled in various ways over the nearest lily pad.

I like the painting better now that the lily has become more prominent.  Still the painting is very different in coloring from the photo I used for my inspiration.  Playing with colors is part of the fun of painting.

The white mat was a distraction on the original painting.  Now a white mat looks better.  I also experimented with two other matting possibilities.  All three possibilities are below.

The colors in the final example are the closest to the mats and also the painting.

I have three paintings on exhibit at Brukner Nature Center as part of the Miami Valley Plein Air Belles Exhibit. Ten of us have three paintings each. The exhibit will be open until September 19, 2010. Come see what we have painted.



Waterlilies was painted from a photo my husband took at the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina. This is the first time I have attempted to paint raindrops on a flower.

This painting of the Herb Garden at Brukner was painted on Yupo which is a very slick watercolor paper. The paint behaves very differently on the slick surface. I was particularly interested in the shapes of the rocks and the shadows on them and around them.

Because the group it called Plein Air, many of us included paintings that were painted on location or "en plein air".

This rosebud was painted at Andy's Garden which is a Garden Center near here.

The background is white but showed as pale blue when it was photographed.