Learning to Draw Life

I learned to draw as a child of The Great Depression. We could not afford paper and pencil. I would go under the huge grape arbor and I would use a brush broom (made from galberry bushes) to sweep out a large area I could draw on. I would use a stick to draw. Then I would usually do a whole story, kind of like a comic book, where I would draw that character doing different things. After I started school they had paper but it was real rough and pulpy. Finally we got a law where school books were free and we could take our books home. When I first started school I didn't have books because you had to buy them. The average cost of school books at that time was about $13 per year and the average wage was $275 per year so most could not afford books until the law changed.

We had a play being put on at our school called The Harvest Queen. The teacher Judy Gertman came from a well-educated family. The play only had 5 or 6 parts which went to families of friends and relatives. So I decided to draw and produce the advertisements and posters. I used white poster board and painted with crayons. The center of the posters had different beautiful drawings of the queen with her gown and tiara. About ten years ago when Arnold and I were visiting the area, a woman named Clevonia King we met said, "Remember that play The Harvest Queen? Well, after it was done my mother went through the community and gathered up all the posters because they were so well done." That was over 70 years ago.

I am self-taught. In later years I was able to afford paints and canvases. I started with oil paints. One of my paintings, Unclaimed, was about 36 X 40. It was a painting of an Irish immigrant mother sitting on a dock breastfeeding and who had not been met. The story was that she arrived from Ireland to meet her husband at Jekyll Island but he was not there when she arrived. My mother's brother came to visit in the sixties and he said it looked like our great-grandmother. The Florida-Times Union came out and did a story and picture of it which was printed in the newspaper.

Under the picture in the article... they called me in and said that something happened. When they developed it it made it look really really old.

I remember when we lived on Fort George Island I painted for my grandchildren to capture all the stories and memories of my life so they could understand what it had been like. I continued painting for my family until it became to difficult to hold a paintbrush in my hand as I approached the grand old age of 90.