The blue past to the yellow future

Never Done: Sorted through Barbara's parents' artwork

Barbara's parents were wonderful artists -- I think they met at the Art Students League of New York, but I might be wrong about that. I know her dad went there -- as it turns out, maybe around the same time that Josh's mom went there. Anyhow, after her parents died, Barbara and her siblings split up their artwork, and much of it hangs in Barbara and Peter's home.

Also, much of it has been boxed up in Barbara and Peter's home, and the day before the new year, she decided to go through it to see what she has. I've spent a lot of time going through boxed up, stored stuff in the past years, and I've also got a bunch of stored dad photographs on my list of things that I still need to go through. Barbara didn't really know what was inside the boxes, so she didn't know if she was going to be delighted or disappointed. I figured that one way or another, opening the boxes would be opening up past worlds, and I wanted to be there for and with her. 

She kept finding other things to do. We played Scrabble. We had to go to Oregon City to buy Dungeoness crab for new year's eve dinner. (Which, somehow, despite having lived in Oregon for 12 years, I never ate. I can't believe I missed out on that all those years!) Eventually we found our way to the living room, where Peter had brought all the boxes, and started to open them. One of the first pieces we took out was a stunning small painting that had clearly been done by her dad when he worked for the WPA. It was a circular image of two brown miners, each with their picks in the air, mining from what seems like the blue past to the yellow future. I think that image will stay with me for the rest of my life. (I will also ask Barbara's permission to post a photo of it here.) 

As we unpacked more and more artwork, and as I watched Barbara assess each piece both emotionally and artistically, I saw her Cincinnati roots like I never saw them before. Many of the paintings were of homes, intersections, or buildings that she recognized -- and even if she didn't remember the painting itself, she knew the place, and what the painting probably meant to whichever parent painted it. I also saw her artistry like I'd never seen it before, even though I've seen the beautiful things she's created. She's a wonderful fiber artist, and she has a deep sense of color (although the colors she uses aren't usually deep -- they are more often saturated pastels.) But looking through her parents' work, I saw how she had inherited their ways of seeing the world. 

Barbara looked through it all, and then we packed it all back up again. All but one: a desolate painting of a house and a tree. Stunning and moody, painted by her mother, and left out to hang somewhere in Barbara and Peter's decidedly NOT desolate home.