April was a very interesting month! I went to Europe for the first time since 1988 and got covid, so had to stay an extra 8 days. The version I got was a mild cold and my lungs did not get worse. Traveling on oxygen is really challenging. I was anxious to get home because my son and daughter-in-law got married after postponing in 2020 and 2021, so they married on April 30th! It was a wonderful wedding!
So, I had to do some planning for the A to Z, writing about women artists, mostly Helen Burling Ottaway, my mother. I took a number of my mother’s etchings to give to friends in Europe and used those because they were what I had. In typing up her resume, I learned more about her! She was a prolific artist and I want to get more of her art out there. I had originally planned to set up an on line shop of her work, but the Europe trip, covid and the wedding derailed that idea! I still want to do that, but I am a bit slow about it. I need to catalog and photograph her work, after I recover from the wedding extravaganza.
When I got home from my trip on April 12, I started doing two posts a day. I did the present letter and then worked from the end of the alphabet, setting up Z for Zarathustra to go live on April 30th. By the last week of April, I had it all set to go live day by day. This is good, because there was no way I would have posted from the last Wednesday on!
I did not get to surf other writers blogs as much as I had planned. Too busy in Europe and too busy with wedding. This week I mostly want to do not very much. I am sorting wedding photographs, the ones I took, and sending them to the new bride and groom.
The picture is of my two aunts at the music rehearsal. I was cantor and led the two hymns. Both of my father’s sisters are church organists. They played four hands for the processional and the recessional and were wonderful! With both my parents gone I was very very grateful to have them present.
Last day of April A to Z, blogging about Women Artists and particularly Helen Burling Ottaway, my mother. Can you name five women artists now?
This etching is from 1975. I was fourteen years old. I remember my parents discussing titles of etchings. My father, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, would often help title them. This etching is titled “Thus spoke Zarasthustra”. I wish that my parents were alive so that I could ask about this etching. Why Friedrich Nietzsche? When I am fourteen, my father receives his MA in mathematics and leaves SUNY Binghampton for a job at General Electric in Alexandria, Virginia. We move from New York State to Virginia and I start high school that year. I think that Alexandria was a much better place for my mother, all the art and artists, than for my father.
I hope that you have had a wonderful month in April: and I hold those in my heart in the war zones or who are lost and suffering.
I am blogging A to Z about artists, particularly women artists and mostly about my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.
My parents both loved puns and my mother loved gardening. Cowslips is an etching that is then painted with watercolors. She has a whole series of pun flower etchings.
I am blogging A to Z about artists, particularly women artists and mostly about my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.
My mother disliked cutting mats more than almost anything except vacuuming and cutting glass. In the late 1980s and early 1990s my grandmother lived two doors down in Alexandria, Virginia. My mother took over part of the basement for matting, glass cutting and framing. Times right before shows included complaints about cutting mats and glass, her saying that she didn’t have enough things framed (though she always did) and at least one piece of glass broke. The X-Acto knife was the tool for mat cutting at that time. My mother usually cut herself at least once for each show. She was particularly annoyed if she bled on the freshly cut mat or the painting or etching.
Hanging the show involves a lot of time out words as well, but she would get excited once it was hung. Then it was time for dress up. Shows were a command performance: my sister and I were to go as well. We dressed up and talked to people politely and ate the strawberries when my mother was not looking. The opening of the show would include food and usually wine. In small glasses. And no, we weren’t allowed to have any. We had to look at the art and be polite to adults.
The photograph today is another of my poems with my mother’s etching. And look, she has avoided cutting a mat. She bought special frames, with two slots. One holds the glass. The second holds the mat with the mounted etching. If the glass rests on the etching, it can ruin it. She mounted all of our ten prints and poems this way. Clever artist and they look wonderful.
There are two Kitchen Window pen and ink drawings, then reproduced in a limited edition: this is Kitchen Window II.
My mother Helen Burling Ottaway always had a wonderfully chaotic garden inside and outside. Kitchen Window is a pen and ink drawing that she then did a limited edition of copies, numbered and signed. She had many dual drawings and etchings. One would be realistic and the second…. maybe the second is what she saw.
My father would pretend to speak French, but he spoke terrible French. Right after high school my mother went to Europe with her parents. They traveled and she stayed in Paris, doing art. Her French was much better than his.
Helen Burling Ottaway was influenced particularly by Japanese art and the empty space on the page. We have an ancestor named Morris Temple. I have a photograph of him in his Civil War uniform and of his wife. He was the owner of Temple Pumps. However, the family story is that he was more interested in Japanese art then pumps and proceeded to “run the company in to the ground”. I do not actually know if this is true. My maternal grandfather’s mother was Tessie Temple, and Morris Temple was her father. My middle name is Temple and my cousin is Fred Temple Burling II but goes by Temple, as my maternal grandfather did. He was F. Temple Burling I.
My mother started a series of paintings of Mount Rainier after she moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1996. I think that she planned to do fifty views or one hundred. She did not get to finish the series but I do have some of them. La Vague and the views of Rainier are tributes to other artists that she loved.
This is an etching where more than one color is applied to the plate. This is a proof, so she is still messing around trying to decide what she wants as final colors for the edition.
I am blogging from A to Z about Helen Burling Ottaway, my artist mother, and other women artists.
Artists are unruly. They are not obedient. They are usurpers. They are unreasonable. This is another etching of my mother, a self portrait, titled “Giantess”. She looks giant, rising from an ocean. Will she have arms and hands and legs, or is she an octopus? We do not know. It may depend on her mood.
I am reading Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius for a Centrum poetry class.
She challenges white poets: why don’t you write about racisim?
I write that we are afraid. I think it is more than that: it is shame. Thinking about her words, I thought about one of my mother’s pieces of art and how it makes me uncomfortable. And that my discomfort with it is new. I wrote this poem.
Race forward
Kim Addonizio asks
Why don’t white poets write about race?
Chickenshits, I think.
Afraid. We are afraid.
My mother called one color Nigger Pink.
She says, “It’s the color that only looks good on black people.”
She looks wicked as she says it and I know that I never should.
She didn’t think she was racist nor a feminist.
One time she says, “Maybe I am a feminist.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
“We had a group of women who went to plant trees. None of them could dig a hole.”
“Oh,” I say.
“They didn’t know how to use a shovel!”
She might be horrified how many high school graduates today would call a spade a shovel.
A mentor art teacher says, “Stop being small,” to her. “Get bigger.”
She starts pastel portraits, larger than life.
One that I love is titled “One Fist of Iron.”
Now: don’t lie. What race do you think the person is? And what gender?
Did you guess correctly? African American and male.
Another friend tells me he is trying to get his father to stop calling Brazil nuts nigger toes.
My mother told me that term too.
And that it was unacceptable.
At my friend’s father’s birthday, I focus my camera on the birthday man.
He holds a bowl of nuts. He says to himself, “I will now eat a politically incorrect nut.” and the camera clicks. I love this photograph because he is 90 and white and reluctantly changing his wicked words.
My mother says there might be hope when a small black child trick or treats her house in black face, in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1990s.
I think there IS hope, even though the race seems slow and painful and there is so much anger
Look in the mirror, white poets.
And write the words.
One Fist of Iron, by Helen Burling Ottaway
The photograph at the beginning of this is not my mother. It is her mother’s mother, Mary Robbins White. I have pictures of five generations of women with that serious expression. She was the wife of George White, the Congregationalist Minister who was president of Anatolia College in Turkey. They and my grandmother and siblings were escorted to the Turkish border in 1916. George White and his wife were two of the main witnesses of the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey.
I am blogging from A to Z about Helen Burling Ottaway, my artist mother, and other women artists.
My mother loved painting trees and doing etchings of trees, but this is a tree peony. Another etching, and this printed with two colors at the same time. Delicate work, to ink the plate with two colors and gently wipe off the excess without mixing them.
I am blogging A to Z about artists, particularly women artists and mostly about my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.
I find two copies of her resume. One is from 1991 and one from 1993. I will add the 1993 information, but it’s a LOT. My mother was prolific! She complained about getting ready for shows and I did not realize how very many she did! I am so proud of her. She died of ovarian cancer in 2000 and I do miss her still.
Helen Burling Ottaway
Del Ray Atelier
105 E. Monroe Ave
Alexandria, VA 22301
SELECTED SOLO SHOWS
1991 Nov Will have solo show at Bird-in-Hand Gallery, Washington, DC
1989 Sept “Cascades: Watercolors of Washington State”, Bird-in-Hand Gallery, Washington, DC
1988 Nov “Fantasy Etchings”, National Orthopedic Hospital, Arlington, VA
1987 Oct “Spirits to Enforce, Art to Enchant”, Fantasy Art, River Road Uniterian Church, Bethesda, MD
1986 Mar “Prints and Poems”, Poetry by Katy Ottaway, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, DC
1984 Nov “Forests, Flower, and Fantasies”, Sola Gallery, Ithaca, NY
Apr “Birdland and other Lullabies”, Pastels, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
1981 May “Fantastical Bestiary”, Etchings and Drawings, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
Mar “The Way of the Brush”, Watercolors, Gallery One, Alexandria, VA
TWO PERSON SHOWS
1986 Nov Two Person Show, “An Occasional Pair of Claws”, Fantasy Art with Omar Dasent, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
1985 Apr Two person Show, “Figures and Foliage”, Pastels, Capital Centre Gallery, Landover, MD
1982 Nov Two Person Show, “The Four Seasons”, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS
1990 Feb “Visions 1990” Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY
1989 Feb “Year in—Year out”, Studio Gallery, Washington, DC
1988 Mar “independent Visions III”, Metro Gallery, Arlington, VA
May Juried Show, Sculpture, The Art League, Alexandria, VA, Juror: Bertold Schmutzart
1987 Dec Juried Show: “The Best of 1987”, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, DC, Jurors: Dr.
Jacqueline Serwer, Sandra Wested, Robert Stewart
1987 Apr “Independent Visions, Fifteen Women Artists”, Metro Gallery, Arlington, VA
Feb “Portraits 1987”, The Art Barn, Washington, DC
1986 Oct “Juried Show, “Printmakers VIII”, The New Art Center, Washington, DC
Jan “Independent Visions”, Metro Gallery, Arlington, VA
1985 Dec Invitational, “Highlights of the Year”, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, DC. Jurors:
Linda Hartigan and Monroe Fabian
Nov Invitational, “The Macadam Nueve-Splintergreen Conspiracy Show”, Gallerie Inti,
Washington, DC. Curated by Omar Dasent and Ann Stein
Oct Juried show, “Printmakers VII”, WWAC, Washington, DC. Juror: Jane Farmer
Mar Invitational, “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Artists”, The Splintergreen
Conspiracy, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, DC. Curated by Omar Dasent
Mar “Shakespearean Images”, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
1984 Nov Juried Show, “Printmakers VI”, WWAC, Washington, DC. Juror: Carol Pulin
July Juried Show, “Printmakers VI”, WWAC, Washington, DC. Juror: Jo Anna Olshonsky
Oct Four Person Show, “Just Four”, Galerie Triangle, Washington, DC
“The First Great American Camel Show”, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
1983 Mar Juried Show, “Printmakers V”, WWAC, Washington, DC. Juror: Barbara Fiedler
Feb Juried Show, “Artists – Art Historians: A Retrospective 1972-1982”, National Conference, The Women’s Caucus for Art,m Bryce Gallery, Moore College, Philadelphia, PA
1982 May Juried Show, “Woman as Myth and Archetype”, WWAC, Wshington, DC. Juror: Mary Beth Edelson
Feb Invitational, “Art is where the Heart is”, Gallery 805, Fredricksberg, VA
Feb “The Printmakers of the WWAC, The Torpedo Factory, Alexandria, VA
Jan Juried Show, “The Eye of Eleanor Monroe”, WWAC, Washington, DC Juror: Eleanor Monroe
1981 Oct. Juried Show, “Collage and Drawing”, WWAC, Washington, DC Juror: Jan Root
Numerous juried shows, the Art League, Alexandria, VA
Numerous group shows, Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
EDUCATION
1967 B.F.A Cornell University, Ithaca, NW
WORK EXPERIENCE
1992-currently Teach Drawing and Watercolor, Capital Hill Arts Workshop, Washington, DC
Teach Art Class for Seniors, Recreation Department, Alexandria, VA
Teach etching workshops and watercolors at the Delray Atelier, Alexandria, VA
1987-1990 Graphic Artist, Al Porter Graphics, Washington, DC
1985 Fall Co-Director of Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
1982 Director of Exhibitions, WWAC, Washington, DC
1982 Director of Gallery West, Alexandria, VA
1981 Chair of Exhibitions Committee of Gallery West, Alexandia, VA
Taught watercolor classes at Washington Women’s Art Center, Washington, DC
Taught children’s art classes for the Arlington Recreation Department
1967-1970 Assistant Curator at the Ithaca College Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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