My grandmother had a troubled life. To say that she raised two children during wartime perhaps gives her too much credit for the work that her eldest kid actually had to do in her place. Good thing my mom’s school taught Home Ec.
Within the more functional parts of her life, Grandma was a seamstress and artist. She’d done costume work for a ballet company. And she painted. Mostly still-life stuff with fruit and flowers. One larger work was likely a response to the 1956 film of “Moby Dick,” a vigorous, folk-art depiction of the whale and several unfortunate whalers in small boats around it. Not bad, but also not something I needed to own when it came time to divvy up her stuff.
The only work of hers I was ever interested in was something I was told she’d drawn in a response to a newspaper photo, from an article about the Holocaust. Unlike her genuine oil-on-canvases, this one’s a scribbled sketch of what looks like charcoal, pastel, and ballpoint pen on crumbling, glued-together cardboard. Compared to what little I know about the rest of her work, this piece is unique.
And it’s good. Especially in light of all the other holocausts being visited upon families these past four decades, all over the world. Some of that perpetrated by former victims.
The old frame was ratty and fell apart. The art itself deserves to be reframed, but first I need to figure out how to preserve it.
Please pardon the ugly watermark.