Category Archives: Helen Burling Ottaway

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Daily Evil: Q is for Quiet

When is it evil to be quiet? When you are witnessing bullying or injustice or someone being harmed. Have you witnessed bullying and stood by and does it bother you?

I am at a dinner, invited. It turns out that the agenda is to talk a partner into staying, because she has quit. Partner one wants partner two to stay. Partner three and I are horrified and don’t want her to stay, but we do not want to say that to her. We frankly can’t wait for her to leave.

The dinner turns in to partner one and two bullying partner three. I am the newest and don’t know what to do. The next day I am ashamed and think, why didn’t I take partner three and leave? What is the matter with me?

Part of it is that I revert to childhood. I survived a complex household with people who were loving sometimes and horrid and drunk at others. Clamming up and being quiet was how I survived. But I am an adult now and I can leave. I can also speak up and say, “Stop. This is not fair. This is an ambush.”

Today’s watercolor is flowers. My mother loved flowers, had a wild and delightful garden, and painted them often. This is a small watercolor, 7 by 10 inches, no date.

I am thinking about the latest shootings. Aren’t we supposed to welcome strangers, for they may be angels in disguise? What did you stock up on during the pandemic? A gun didn’t occur to me. I bought more water filters and wished I could buy for the whole county. I bought seeds. I bought rice and beans. You can’t eat bullets and they aren’t good toilet paper either. I studied local edible plants. What did you buy? So many people are so afraid.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nothing. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

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Daily Evil: P is for Persnickety

Again, this might be evil in some situations and not in others.

I interviewed at the National Institutes of Health in the mid 1980s, with Dr. Steve Rosenburg. He asked how good I was with details. I said it depended. He asked what I meant. I said that I was excellent and persnickety when it came to science experiments, but at my present job I had trouble caring about the exact margin widths that the director of the non-profit I was working for wanted. He said that might be important. I said that I agreed, but I would be better off in a lab. He hired me.

I was excellent and persnickety in the lab and went from there to medical school 3 years later.

Etchings are profoundly persnickety. You can’t even do the drawing until you have tarred the zinc plate and then you etch the drawing in acid, take the tar off, ink the plate, run it through the press with paper and put more tar on the plate after you wipe the ink off. And once you get what you want, you have to re-ink the plate for every picture. This etching has two colors, which makes wiping enough ink off to get the lines right very tricky.

This is “Those are the pearls”, 4 out of 25, 1981, Helen Burling Ottaway. The plate size is 8.5 by 11 inches.

I am having to be persnickety about photographing my mother’s works. I am getting better at it, but it’s tricky to get the light right, without shadows. The cats always want to help. Today they are out in the box watching the birds, since they kept walking over the etching. I am jealous of the professionals downtown who have a camera on a frame and can be very very persnickety about the photograph. I may try my tripod, as a weak second. I have my mother’s slides too, so I could try digging those out. She did her own mostly, so I am not sure about them.

Hooray for the letter P!

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Daily Evil: O is for Ornery

OOOOOO, ornery. What a lovely word! It can be purely negative or it can be positive and joking, or it can just mean stubborn.

This is one of Helen Burling Ottaway’s self portraits. My photograph, through glass. This is 20 by 26 inches, pastel chalk, dated 1979.

I had this up in the guest room, but a guest said he felt nervous with her watching. I laughed and said, “Ok, yeah, I can see that.” I moved it. My mother always looked fierce when she was concentrating. She captures that expression very well. People often thought she was angry when she was teaching, but it’s just concentration. I could tell the difference but the students could not.

And speaking of ornery:

Sol Duc helping with the photograph. Sort of.

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Daily Evil: N is for Nowledge

WHY do we spell knowledge with a K? And why does know rhyme with no? If that isn’t evil, I don’t know what is. Ok, here is a site that explains: https://www.dailywritingtips.com/kn-words-in-english/.

Let’s talk about knowledge and technique in art. Above are two watercolors by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway. Neither has a date. The lower one is certainly unfinished and I am not sure about the upper one. I can tell by the technique that the lower one is a much earlier painting. Some of the watercolor nudes do have a year: 1998. That was two years before she died of cancer. I think the lower one is from the 1970s, but the use of wet and dry paper for painting is already apparent, as well as color and line.

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Daily Evil: L is for Longing

Is longing evil? I don’t know. Rumi writes that all longing is longing for being reunited with the Beloved and is a form of prayer. I think that is gorgeous.

L is also for Lake. This is a 9 by 12 inch watercolor, dated 1991. I don’t know the title. This is Lake Matinenda in Ontario, north of Michigan. My grandparents bought land there and we went up in the summers year after year. I have not been there since 2018 because of Covid and distance. I do know that stretch of shoreline.

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Daily Evil: K is for Katherine

K for Katherine. The picture is one of my grandmothers, Katherine White Burling. My mother drew this from a photograph with conte crayon. I am named after this grandmother. This is a big drawing, more than life size, 18 by 24. I photographed it through glass, avoiding most reflections. My grandmother is wearing a cameo. We have a photograph of her grandmother wearing it as well. I do not know exactly when Helen Burling Ottaway drew this, early to mid 1990s, I think. The story is fiction but my grandmother could be quite wicked, so she inspired this. After all, Katherine means “purity”.

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Don’t get the Willies

“Caitlyn.” says grandmother. “You are 13 now.”

Caitlyn sighs internally. Another lecture about becoming an adult? This is the unpredictable grandmother, sharp as a knife. She will never behave like the book grandmothers. Though some of her friends say that their grandmothers don’t behave either.

“Where is your phone?” says grandmother.

“I left it in my coat.” says Caitlyn.

“I think you should take off your shades, too,” says grandmother gently. “Tea?”

Caitlyn reluctantly removes her internet connected sunglasses. Pale pink, but this grandmother isn’t fooled. Was it her eye motions that gave her away?

“Yes, please,” says Caitlyn politely. Her grandmother has an elegant tea service out and heats water by boiling it. Completely archaic. Maybe this is about net overuse.

“Are you observing males or females or both?” says grandmother.

Rats, thinks Caitlyn. Sex after all. She prims her mouth.

“I want to talk to you about the willies.” says grandmother.

“Being scared?” says Caitlyn. Good, not about sex.

“There is another meaning.” says grandmother pleasantly. “You will encounter certain men when you are old enough to date. I encourage you to study the boys for now, but you are more mature than they are. That is less true with the girls.”

“Hmmm,” says Caitlyn. She is studying her teacup, eyes down.

“Certain men will try very hard to control you. They will make promises that are silly and statements that are lies.”

“Ok,” says Caitlyn. Next comes the embarrassing part.

“You will recognize them in part because there are places they will not go and people they will not speak to. They are very very rigid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“As they get older, their territory will shrink further and further. They become more and more isolated. You do not want involvement with one of these, for two reasons. One is that they will try to isolate you.”

Caitlyn smirks. As if.

“The other: well, you know the story of Pinocchio?”

Caitlyn blinks. “Uh, yes.”

“In the story it is the doll’s nose that grows. In people the nose can grow, but it is really other parts that shrink.” says grandmother. “So it is important not to get the willies.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Caitlyn. And they both sip their tea.

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Daily Evil: J for Jarring

The news is pretty jarring most days. I hope that we remove viagra and the drugs of that ilk from FDA approval if the mifaprostone removal ruling holds. No viagra and the pregnancy rate would go down, wouldn’t it?

The watercolor is not jarring. The chrysanthemums are in a jar or a vase or a bottle. What amazes me about this glorious watercolor is the transparency of the jar along with the flowers alternating between soft and sharp. This is from 1992 and is just under 10 by 13 inches. My daughter picked this out from her grandmother’s artworks to keep.

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Daily Evil: I is for irritated

I am feeling a bit like this elf: irritated about the rain.

Ok, yeah, I did move to the Pacific Northwest 23 years ago, and I could have moved away. I love the beaches and the mountains here. But when we are having sun once every 10 days or two weeks in the season they call “spring” here, I do get a little irritated at the rain. Yesterday and today the wind is howling too. Whitecaps and I am very happy not to be out in a boat.

This etching is 2.5 by 3 inches, titled Rain Forest, number 5 out of 25, 1985.

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Daily Evil: G is for Grumpy

Gruff, grouchy, grumpy and garden! The watercolor is a small one by Helen Burling Ottaway, my mother. She did not date any of the watercolor sketches in it. I think it is from the 1970s. I very much remember the pot that the tree is in. That is an avocado that she grew from a pit.

Is being grumpy evil? I don’t think so. I don’t think we should inflict our grumpiness on others, but we may have very good reasons to be grumpy. When I was having difficult things at home, I would give a heads up to my nurse that I was grumpy but not at her or the patients. That helped a lot, because I did not have a perfect wall about my emotions. I also hate when people are pretending to be nice when they are angry or hurting or frustrated or grumpy.

Sometimes people say, “I don’t like to be around people who aren’t positive.” Well, now, wait. Do they have to be positive if a family member dies? If they lose their job? If they are very worried about making ends meet when a car has broken down? That would be a fair weather friend, who is only present in the good times, and abandons me when I am stressed. That person is not really a friend at all. The true friends are the ones who notice I am grumpy but stay present anyway. And they ask if it is about them. They do not try to fix it or ignore it: it’s my mood, not theirs. Hooray for real friends who are present through thick and thin!

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Daily Evil: F is for Frustration

F is also for Final. Death is frustratingly final. I can keep talking to the person, but they don’t talk back, except maybe in dreams. Even then, it’s my version of them.

F is also for fine art and father. This is a drawing of my father in college by my mother. My mother did art all the time and carried a sketchbook around nearly all the time. Every so often she mislaid it, searched, and started a new one until the old one surfaced. I was two when she did these drawings. My impression of fine art was that it involved continuous practice. My mother thought about art most of the time, as her diaries confirm. I love the sketch books.

These two drawings are on notebook paper. My mother sent them to her mother with letters when I was two. My grandmother was in Europe.