My brain just simply SHUT DOWN! It refused to work for me anymore! After eighteen years selling Real Estate in the Venice Florida area, I had no choice but to retire. I was seventy five. I had lost my precious daughter Susie from cancer. After months of grieving, I seemed to remain at a standstill.

That is when my daughter Pamela, a psychiatrist living in Salem Ohio, after much persuasion and a lot of coaxing to start painting again, didn’t give up on me until she got some action.

Her initial effort was sending me an easel, a set of brushes and a box of French oil paints. Oh! Why did my daughter send me all these things? I hadn’t painted pictures since my high school art classes. I don’t even know if I can paint anymore.

Our little country school was very fortunate to hire Ms Lela Cross the best art teacher in all the Union County schools. Following her wonderful instructions, I had painted two pictures from small postcard pictures, followed by a ‘still life’ picture and lastly a portrait.

This Hawaii beach picture is quite large and now hangs on a wall in my den!  The picture I used was a little larger than a post card.

This is of Lee’s mansion overlooking the National Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC.  I painted that picture from a post card.

After those two paintings Ms Cross encouraged me to paint a ‘still life’.  So I placed a vase, a statue I had made, and few silk flowers on the white porcelain table that was in our classroom and then proceeded to paint this picture above.

Now I have graduated to portraits! For this portrait of my mother, I used an eight by ten brown and white studio photo of her at age eighteen years of age. It was the last of my high school paintings.

After having each of those paintings framed, they have continued to hang in my home all these years. My daughters grew up always seeing their mother’s paintings on the wall of their home. I have a granddaughter who delights in telling her friends “My Gramma has original paintings in her home.” She doesn’t add that they are also painted by her gramma!!!!!

OK! Back to the drawing board……..this is only a guess because I have made the mistake of not dating my paintings, but I was probably eighty when I finally started to paint again.

I chose as my first portrait, a picture of the Christmas card from my daughter’s family. It was of Pamela and Tracy’s little girls, on a 20″x24″ canvas replicating that Christmas card picture. A nice feature of using oil paints, you can let it dry and continue painting over it to perfect your picture. I have to confess, I painted it over so many times I lost track of exactly how many times I did just that.  Over and over and over until finally this is IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finding my daughter loved the painting, had it framed and hung it in her home, gave me the courage to continue with portraits. I have completed twenty three and am currently working on three more. My paintings now hang in my family’s homes in Georgia, Montana and in Ohio including my own home.

So I can tell you one thing for sure, my daughter’s advice to start painting again and her undying effort to get me moving again was THE BEST MEDICINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She got me off that sofa and moving again and now I can’t stop moving and moving and moving and——————–!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FRF ♥