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.
Oooooo surely it’s evil to make up new words. Or to verb words.
I think that my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, was thinking about Winnie-ther-Pooh’s Heffalumps when she made this. This etching is another small one, 3 by 2.5 inches. She did many tiny fantasy etchings. This is a proof, for me. An artist’s proof is an experimental run, before the final edition. She might change the ink color, or put the tar mixture back on the plate and change it.
I have had this album since I was very little. Winnie-ther-Pooh with a Brooklyn accent, but really really wonderful!
Ooooo, B is for Brag. I can brag about my mother artist AND I got to do work with her. In the 1980s I ask if I can write poems that she will do etchings to illustrate them. She had done a series with a friend when I was a baby. I was jealous and wanted her to illustrate mine.
“Yes, BUT,” she replies, “The poems have to rhyme. I don’t like free verse.”
I laugh, because the man she did etchings and poems with before did all free verse.
This was right after I had finished college and wanted to write, but was certainly rather terrified about submitting anything. My degree was in Zoology and Scandinavian Studies, so I did not exactly have the writing connections.
I sent my mother ten poems, all rhyming. One was written with a finished etching in mind, but she did etchings for the rest. Almost all are about animals.
She had a friend who runs the Lead and Bread Press print 50 of each poem on etching paper and then started running the editions. We had a gallery opening together in the 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia. This did not make me rich but it certainly made me pleased and proud. Bragging rights are mine. The prints and poems are in a book as well, of women sibling artists. We got in even though we were mother-daughter rather than siblings.
A friend of mine died in February. She has known me since I was born, because she was in college with my parents. In fact, my father got arrested for having her graduation party, though it was thrown out of court. Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963, and the problem with the party was that it was mixed race. Luckily there were no drugs and no minors drinking. I was the youngest minor, age 2. My mother was left with me, terrified that she could be lynched.
Anyhow, this friend is an artist, like and unlike my mother. I spoke to her daughter-in-law a few days ago and she says she is in the anger stage of grief. Yes, I know what she means. And new grief brings up all the old grief. How annoying. March 29 was the day my little sister died of cancer, so that all comes up too.
I keep reading that we should be positive. I hate it and I disagree. Sometimes we can grieve and go through stages of grief. Anger can be an indication that we are in a bad relationship or that we are being mistreated. Sometimes it is connected to old past anger, though, that needs to be cleared out. Have I succeeded with that? I don’t know.
Is anger evil? I do not believe any feelings are evil. Acting on them may be evil, but it’s complicated. Feelings are information, part of our senses. This doesn’t mean that we always interpret things correctly, so sometimes we need to check. “When you said this, I interpreted it this way. Is that what you meant?” I usually have to wait a week if I am upset about something, so I can have the feelings calm. I get better and better about not acting on anger. I do not mind feeling it.
A is for Adam and Eve as well. This is one of Helen Burling Ottaway’s etchings, titled “First Valentine”.
For the process of making an etching, read here. This is from 1982, number 29 out of 35, a limited edition each run and signed by the artist.
I have been thinking in a desultory manner or perhaps not really thinking about the A to Z April Challenge. I want to have a whole month of my mother’s fabulous art, but what is my theme? Mothers? No. Women artists? No. Discrimination against women artists? Sigh, no. Oh! I read an article yesterday about how the negative and nasty headlines get the major clicks. Today I read another very nice kind blog post about putting something nice into the world. So that gives me my theme! My mother’s art and daily evil impulses.
Impulses, not actions. Don’t we all feel those nasty impulses? Now I am interested in my own theme: how does that tie into my mother’s art? You don’t know? I don’t know either, but I know that many of us have complex feelings about our mothers. You might too. What does her art reveal or what does it trigger in me? And you get to enjoy her art, while you react with prim or gleeful horror at the Daily Evil Art Impulse.
Happy April!
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The first photograph is of one of Helen Burling Ottaway’s watercolors. It is signed, matted and shrink wrapped. Date: 1996. She died of cancer in 2000. I do not know the title, but this is Lake Matinenda, in Ontario, Canada. My maternal family has land there and I have gone there since age 5 months.
I am blogging A to Z about artists, particularly women artists and mostly about my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.
This is my sister Chris again, from a 1978 sketchbook that my mother mailed to me. My mother had a sketchbook with her most of the time. She kept everything. My father did not sort anything and I am just now beginning to catalog the art, the sketchbooks, and my mother’s diaries. My mother died in 2000 and my father in 2013. The silver lining of being off from work post pneumonia is that I am going through the boxes and beginning to organize things. It looks like it is not a small job.
#Blogging from A to Z #letter D #art #women artists #ATOZCHALLENGE
My mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, was a very busy and prolific artist.
Every New Year’s, she would resolve to paint a water color a day. By March she would complain that she had only painted 25 or 30. However, she would also be doing birthday presents for me and my sister and our father, all in March, and crafts and etchings and pastels and a life drawing class and the sketchbook that she constantly carried.
B is also for baby. The etching is of my sister, Christine Robbins Ottaway, as a baby. The title is Chris I and she did this in 1968.
I have described the process for etchings here: Four Seasons.
My mother was a very busy artist.
#ATOZBLOGGINGCHALLENGE2022 # art # Women artists # Helen Burling Ottaway
This month my topic for Blogging from A-Z is art and particularly my mother, the artist Helen Burling Ottaway, born May 31, 1938. She died May 15, 2000, of ovarian cancer. I am starting with her sketches, and the self portrait. My mother sent me a sketchbook for Christmas, 1978, that I still have. I was 17 and was an exchange student to Denmark. She drew pictures of lots of family and friends and mailed me the sketchbook. I really love it still.
I love her comments, too. They are often very funny. Here is my father and what was happening.
Sketch of Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway by Helen Burling Ottaway
My theme for the April AtoZ blog challenge this year is art. I think it will mostly be my mother’s art. She died in 2000 of ovarian cancer. My only sibling died in 2012 of breast cancer and my father in 2013 of emphysema. And I have the art: my parents were both packrats and trying to deal with the house and an out of date will took about three years. Moving stuff around, getting rid of stuff. The art initially went in to a storage unit and then into my house. My mother Helen Burling Ottaway was prolific! And she kept every single piece of art and her diaries back to high school! I found a suitcase with my grandfather’s poetry as well: that will be for another day.
This painting is of my sister. My mother started oils later in her career and Michael Platt, a DC artist, said something like, “Quit doing tiny things. Do something big.” My mother started doing life size and larger than life portraits in chalk pastel and in oils. This painting captures my sister when she was twenty: emotions. I like it but I also think that it is frightening.
Christine Robbins Ottaway age 20, by Helen Burling Ottaway, oil, 1984
Whew, at the end of Blogging from A to Z, happy things all month. I am tired. This weekend I went to see my daughter at college. We went for a walk and saw the above bird. More than one. Have you guessed?
I love the precise collar of black and white that stops at the back of the neck. They swim much lower in the water than our mallards, and the mallards don’t dive.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
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 - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete 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.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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