More Photos, But of Paintings

It looks like today is going to be a “two-fer” on blogging. After posting about our relatives selling their home, I sent an e-mail of encouragement (at least I hope it was encouraging) to Richard (RVPAINTER). He has been a bit discouraged lately.

In that message, I encouraged him to continue painting, but perhaps just change his subjects from still life of fruits to something different. The idea is to help keep the interest in painting, and who knows, he might find a hidden talent for other subjects and methods. I mentioned how it was that my mother occasionally changed subject, perspectives, and colors to keep herself interested in her works.

As a benefit to Richard and to share some of the works of my mother, I will post a few photos that I took of some of her paintings, showing differences in subjects and colors. Mother did the vast majority of her paintings in oil on canvas board and later, stretched canvas. I never had her talent for painting, but I did learn some skills in composure from being exposed to a lot of her paintings.

At present, I only have photos of 46 of her paintings. Over the years, I’ve had as many as 65 in our homes at one time. Since we began down the road to full-timing in an RV, I gave almost all of them to my sister. The next time I am at her house, I’ll need to take pictures of more of Mother’s paintings.

Oh, I won’t be showing all 46 of her paintings here, at least not all at once. Perhaps I’ll sprinkle some more in later posts. Call this a tribute to Mother, an inspiration in my life.

Mother primarily painted landscapes, many that were panoramic in nature and some in closer studies.  Most were in multiple colors, but at times she went into a “monochrome period” where her paintings were mostly just two or three colors.

When Mother began painting, she could not do faces of any kind or even somewhat reasonable images of animals.  Thus, if there were figures of animals or humans in her paintings, there was little detail with them.  In this painting, the winter clothing is used to “hide” the faces.

She did most of her paintings from pictures rather than actually painting the subjects that she was viewing.  I remember her getting and saving every calendar with photos on them, pictures taken from magazines and books, and just about any source of an image.

Then there was an occasional still life.  With Mother, there were also occasional surprises.  Can you see the bird in this painting?  Many a person has commented on this painting and never noticed the bird until it was mentioned to them.

(Back when I was stationed in Pakistan, I ran across a picture from an advertisement in a magazine. It showed a field of tall grass with a very beautiful horse walking across it, fairly close in the foreground of the photo. But, just in front of the horse was a young blonde lady, au naturel, and most of the guys in my unit never noticed her. I had that photo hanging on the wall of my room, but somehow that picture got lost in one of many moves over the years.)

This next painting shows both the “monochrome” style as well as a closer look at the subject, instead of a panoramic image.

While many photographers believe that black and white images have more power, I’ve shown others where color REALLY makes the difference. For instance, in a photography class for our church kids, I created a PowerPoint presentation and part of that was two photos of a boat at a dock. The first one in black and white was a rather bland photo. But, when I showed the same image in color, it showed that the boat was on fire. The black and white couldn’t capture the essence of the flames.  Unfortunately, since the photos were not taken by me, I cannot share them here.

Then Mother had a tendency to paint “special” paintings.  This one she painted specifically for Jo and I.  I don’t know if it will be visible, but she put our names on the two boats.

Giving all those paintings to my sister was very difficult.  It was almost like giving up the presence of Mother on a daily basis.  She had been with me for many years, hanging on the walls of our residences.  Now, we have a few of the smaller ones she did hanging on some of the walls of our Mobile Suites.

If enough interest is shown, I will post more of Mother’s paintings in later posts.  If you were to look at her paintings and then to some of my photographs, especially landscapes, you could see her influence on me in the composure of my photos.  Bless you, Mother, for what you gave me, and not just life itself.