Friday, May 22, 2020

The Color of Dirt - Whistler's Mother #QuarantineBoredomBusters






Do you think Whistler's Mother ever grew tired of her son's artistry projects?  Maybe he left his brushes and palette knife out all the time.  Maybe the house smelled of linseed oil.  Or maybe he managed to get a little Payne's Gray paint on her dining table.  Who knows, but she wasn't exactly the epitome of joy; at least not in the painting for which she (and her son) are famous.  

As history's fuzzy memory would have it, Anna Whistler was not James McNeill Whistler's intended subject that fated day in 1871 when he began work on Arrangement in Gray and Black No.1 (later dubbed Whistler's Mother).  Whistler had intended to paint a model who, as it turns out, was unable to make the appointment.  He had also planned to paint his subject in a standing position.  Only his poor momma was unable to stand for the entire sitting.  Thus, the little foot-stool and relaxed positioning as Whistler seemingly did his best to keep his mother comfortable for the duration of the sitting.  Even still, based on her appearance, she may have grown tired of being there for so long.  Or maybe she was just itching to get back to her responsibilities.  Perhaps she was checking off a mental list of things to do... 1) Buy more oil for her reading lamps.  2) Mend her sweet boy's socks. 3) Scrub Payne's Gray paint off the dining room table.

If any of the above ponderings hold a shred of truth I can relate to Momma Whistler.  It seems like a never-ending chore just trying to keep the groceries stocked and stay on top of the day-to-day chores.  And don't even get me started on the subject of keeping a clean home.  I live in the country, so my daily tasks include dirt removal.  Some days it seems as though I could literally plant a garden in my entryway.  And no, I don't have a mud-room.  This city-girl transplant didn't understand the need for a mud-room back when we first built our house.  I now see the error of my ways.  But that's a story for a different day.

When we first built our house, we had the sweetest front porch, all in white, to match the white shutters on our gray house.  It took one summer for me to realize that white was a poor choice, as it showed all the mud my dear hubby tracked up to the house. We live on a hobby farm, which loosely translated means my hubby loves to roll in the dirt... What? No? That's not what he does?  Well he sure has me fooled some times.  Regardless, when summer No.2 rolled around I quickly repainted our porch in a lovely shade of mud.  O.K., truth be told, not so lovely, and definitely not my favorite, but seemingly more practical.  But then I soon realized that mud dries.  So the color I should have been shooting for was not mud, but more a lovely shade of dried dirt. Please don't judge, surely I could just hose down the porch twenty times a day... O.K., so the color of dried dirt it is.

So back to the photo above.  This mother's day my hubby asked what I wanted to do to celebrate.  I told him I wanted to do another #QuarantineBoredomBuster.  Thus, the inspiration for the above photo.  We took the liberty of adding our own special image in the painting on the wall.  Maybe you'll recognize it from another one of our painting reenactments.  

I think we can learn a lot from Momma Whistler. 1) Sometimes we just need to stop what we're in the middle of for our kids' sake.  Who knows, something magnificent may come of it.  2) It's O.K. to let people see us as we really... tired, slouchy and a little distracted... because that's just life.  3) Sometimes the Payne's Gray doesn't wash off, and that's O.K. too, because that's the stuff memories are made of in the midst of that thing we call living.  




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