As an artist, I’m sometimes asked if I come from a family of artists, and I have to answer no. My mom worked in the bakery department of a grocery store and later became a homemaker after hurting her back, and my dad worked in a feed mill and then drove truck. I may not have grown up in house with painters and sculptors, but I did grow up surrounded by creativity, from my sister and brother playing instruments to my mom singing, always singing, and my dad playing handy man and Mr. Fix-It around the house. And perhaps it’s one of my earliest memories that actually set me on the path to being an artist. I vividly remember sitting around the table in our toy room making holiday crafts with my mom, sister, and brother when I was very young. I don’t know if it was because we didn’t have many decorations at the time or if it was just a way to keep three young children busy. I was probably three at the time, and my mom had a stack of construction paper, scissors, and glue. We made paper loop chains, Christmas trees, snowmen, and Santas with cotton balls for the beard. I think that was the moment where I realized that you could take a blank piece of paper and create an entire world with it whether with scissors and glue or with pencil and crayon.
But my mom’s crafting and making didn’t stop there. She was always creating things—from hand stitching book bags for us kids when we were little from old jeans, to making a play set for us with marker and construction paper on a big piece of board with roadways and parking lots so we could play with our Matchbox cars. And of course, I remember how excited she was when she got her sewing machine—the sewing machine that still sits in the kitchen by the basement steps where she left it from the last time she used it. She made her own window treatments, altered her clothes, and made her own blankets from two flat sheets and some batting. She was always devising something to make or alter, and that extended to her cooking and baking. My mom was a great cook and an even better baker, and though she would get recipes from family and friends, she would alter and change them to suit her tastes—a little extra water in the chocolate chip cookies, a few different ingredients for the sauce for Aunt Ludi’s shish kabobs. Just little tweaks to fit her tastes.
Now if you really knew my mom, you’d know how particular she was—some would say pig headed or obstinate, but things had to be a particular way—HER way. They had to meet HER tastes and HER sensibilities, and that went for the things that she collected, as well. Whether it was trivets, or angels, or wind chimes, she was always changing and altering them because something about them just didn’t sit right with her. When helping Dad go through somethings after Mom died, we found a box of wind chimes—new chimes—where she had cut all the strings just so that she could restring them her way with the string she wanted to use. They just didn’t measure up to her standards. We also found many unfinished sewing projects. With some of them, we weren’t even sure what she had in mind to do with them. And that brings me to one final unfinished thing—something that she wasn’t totally pleased with—something that she wanted to change and alter to fit her particular sensibilities—something that she never had a chance to finish. I call it her last angel.
Apparently she bought this angel and didn’t like how it was painted, so as Dad told me, she used paint stripper to remove the paint and painted it her way. She wasn’t satisfied with what she had done, and stripped it again. The problem is the angel is plastic resin, and the stripper began to eat through the plastic creating holes. She tried glue, silicone caulk, Play Doh, plaster, and probably lots of other things to fix the holes. But nothing worked. And she used more stripper and more stripper which just made the holes bigger, and eventually it ate away at the waist of the angel, and made the angel fall into two separate pieces. She just couldn’t get it fixed.
Dad asked me if I could fix it. Mom had worked so hard on it and tried so many things, but just couldn’t solve the problem. Perhaps I could figure out a way to get it back together and paint it in someway that Mom might like. So I took it back home to Virginia, and over the last month and a half, I cleaned it and scrubbed it and picked plaster and clay and glue and caulk off of it. After it was clean and dry, I used a special epoxy clay to fill the many holes and to get the two separate pieces back together. It took a couple weeks since I worked a little at a time, and the harden clay had to be carved and sanded so it blended into the rest of the sculpture.
I then painted it with acrylic paint. I think it was originally painted in a realistic manner with flesh tones for the skin and blue on the wings. But I kept thing that it needed to look like stone, so I started off with a solid grey and then used a watered down black to fill in all of the crevices and details. I wiped the black off of the raised parts, and it gave it the appearance of weathers stone. I was able to get it done just in time for her memorial service this past weekend.
It’s probably not how Mom had envisioned it, but I painted it the way that I saw it. After all, for me this angel is a memorial to my mom and her creativity and her problem solving—a memorial to her particular tastes and pig headedness, and what’s a better memorial than a “stone” angel. I’m glad that I got to do this last thing for Mom and bring back her angel. It’s not unfinished anymore.
So, no, I don’t come from a family of artists, but I come from a family full of creativity—a family that figures out how to solve problems and to fix them. And that’s what being an artist is—creatively solving problems. I will always remember Mom’s crafting and making, and I will always remember her as someone who passed that desire to make and create onto me.