I took some time today to go through some of my mother’s work for her BFA at the U of Arizona back in the mid-50’s. She had a concentration in theater and had some talent as an artist. What I’m sharing is work for, I suppose, a costuming class. It’s a notebook of paintings of costumes with notes on the back of each one, detailing material and historical background. They’re quite good, as were my mother’s few paintings that she did through the 60’s and 70’s. Very few.
For my mother (who died almost eighteen years ago), after graduating, taught English in Ajo, Arizona for a couple of years (great stories came from that period), then went to the University of Texas, started an MS in Library Science, didn’t finish because she didn’t want to write a thesis, met my dad, they married, moved to DC, she worked as a children’s librarian for a bit, then they ended up in Bloomington, where she had me, and then spent the next forty years or so taking care of me, then elderly relatives, and mostly fighting some sort of illnesses or another. She never learned to drive, she read a lot, she felt abandoned by the Church after Vatican II, she was mostly angry at the people closest to her – sometimes with good reason, but not always – and unhappy with the world. But here’s her work from a time when, perhaps, she wasn’t.