From the time she could first hold a crayon in her small little hands she was an artist. Our daughter could spend many hours coloring pictures, she and I sitting at her child's size table with the tiny chairs, side by side, content in our world. She was a neat, stay-in-the-lines type, not the scribbler. Page after page in a coloring book, or on clean white typing paper making drawings of smiling people and rainbows. The only other intent childhood activity she had such purpose with was playing with her babydolls.
In her teens she took lessons at the local Community Arts program as she wanted more that what she was able to do at school. The hitch...it was a "Live Model" class and she was a minor. I had to give permission for her to take the class. We laughed when she said that the models seem to be all retirement age versus younger people. Many of the volunteer model's were from the nearby Retirement Community. Her professional attitude was not the nakedness of the model but the study of her art detail.
She worked endlessly to perfect hands and eyes. I felt I was looking at the work of Michelangelo's sketches. These parts that were so hard to make feel real to the eye. I am the keeper of these priceless works that she has left here tucked in sketchbooks, large art paper and as well as her art portfolio. It is a treasure of my daughter's talent that I knew she always had.
A gift needs to be nurtured with plenty of time and ample supplies. Boxes of crayons and watercolors moved to colored markers to colored pencils and then to pastels and charcoal. My father, in his artist wisdom enjoyed the artist blossoming in his granddaughter. After his death my mom gave us his watercolor paints, canvases, and sketchbooks. I wish he had some of his sketches still in those books for K. to have seen. He loved watercolors but his skill in sketching out his watercolor to be were derived from his education in Architecture. Both he and K. have similarities. They both worked silently and alone. Clean of distraction. I wish he had lived long enough to have seen the artist she has become as he would have been immensely proud of what she has created.
A most treasured item that came to us after Papa's death was his small teak folding chair that he would sit upon while out sketching. This K. took to using while she did her work at her drafting table. While it is up in the barn in storage it is a chair I could never let go of. Two of the most disciplined artists have used that special chair.
When K. creates a new drawing and tells me on the phone about it I imagine her leaning over her paper with charcoal pencil in hand. I wonder what she might be thinking as the drawing comes to life. Many drawings she has done are quite large and I can't figure out how she keeps them protected. I can still see us drawing together. I would ask, "What are you going to draw?" and she would smile, pause, look at me, "What are you going to make mommy?". It wasn't so much what we would each be drawing, it was about us being together as we did our 'Art'. Praising each other for what we did and drawing some more.
