Painting Memories

Nanny's Room—Painting evocative of my grandmother's Victorian furniture. Click on image to enlarge.

O N   W O O D — This is a painting I did on a piece of pine, 22 x 11 inches. The colors are somewhat subdued in this photo, it's pretty vivid actually. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house, a 250 year old saltbox home that had been in our family for 150 of those years. It was filled with antiques and the accumulation of objects that can only be gathered over many generations-much of which I own today. Her bedroom furniture was a Victorian set, with delicately painted flowers on the top and in the center of the drawers. I would stare at them, and then stare at the real flowers/plants in her room and even at that early age, I knew that I wanted to create images like that for people to look at. 

While I didn't at all try to replicate exactly the way I remember it, this is an homage none-the-less to those early artistic memories of mine. This piece uses water-based paints with layers of graphite grids added in, and clearcoated several times with non-yellowing polyurethane. I purposely left much of the drawn-in design, and actually did more raw pencil drawings on top of the paint when i was finished. Her furniture was quite old, even 45 years ago, and was quite scratched, which I replicated in this piece as well. The result is my contemporary take on the fussy Victorian period, at least the way I see it. My friend Mary must have felt the same way-it's hanging in her home now!