Today I spent a lovely few hours with artist Linda Townshend. We shared stories of family, as women do, and then we shared stories of inspiration and regret, as artists. Linda recalled a visit to my mother’s bedside, during her last months, in which the two of them painted disks of watercolor paper, with simple color forms, turning the circles and moving forward — making things, not worrying about perfect gradations of color, or exact reproduction of an image — and, said Linda, it was just what she needed that day. She told me it was one of the ten best days of her life: an afternoon making art with a woman tethered to an oxygen machine. Dad heated up some bean and bacon soup, and the three of them ate lunch together.
As Linda told me this story, I thought of the ways I try to make a difference, to ‘be important’ — and I realized I just need to turn the circle, add color, and keep going. Thank you, Linda. What a wonderful afternoon.
The image above is a square from a quilt hand-sewn by my great-grandmother, Mary Catherine Steer. She cut the squares from my mother’s outworn clothes — this particular block is from a favorite set of pajamas, circa 1930.