I find myself without words this week, and last week’s post leads nicely into a further discussion of the art of Bill Blumenau.
So — with the help of my dad, who took the pix — I’ll devote this week’s installment to a display of some of my grandfather’s paintings and drawings.
It’s possible that some of these were displayed in the 1975 art exhibit I wrote about last week. They might also have been shown in other exhibits in Stamford-area public places in the 1970s and ’80s.
Nowadays, they stay at home. But you can come into the gallery. You can even click the pictures to see ’em bigger, if you want.
Allegedly, the two kids are modeled on my brother and I, dropped into an unfamiliar setting. If you read this blog regularly, you’ve seen that red tuque before.
Here’s another painting I’ve mentioned (but not shown) on the blog before.
No backstory on this one. Looks like something my grandfather might have photographed in Maine.
I wonder where the inspiration for this came from. Personal travels in Stamford or Springfield, Mass., or maybe someone else’s photo of New York City?
I enjoy the mundanity of this moment in time. I also love the tiny red splash of the handkerchief in his pocket.
Always liked this one, myself.
This is based on one of the Keuka Lake pix taken around 1983 and mentioned, but not included, in this post.
This appears to me to be drawn, rather than painted, so I’ll put it in for variety’s sake.
One last from the coast. The ocean has probably claimed this place by now, wherever it was.
Crumbs, I’d be proud to own any of those!
The one of the washing flapping on the line brought back memories of laundry frozen to the clothesline. They did smell nice, as a reward.
Unlike many of his works, the clothesline one came totally from your grandfather’s imagination. He wanted to contrast the old and staid and somewhat decrepit with the new and gleaming and big and strong. The big background buildings are more or less New York City, to which he commuted daily to work for a brief period in the late 1940s. You know it won’t be long until the two houses in the foreground are demolished in the name of progress, which, interestingly enough, is exactly what happened to his house on Hope Street years after this was painted!
I think they’re all wonderful. My fave is the top one, the 2 kids in the snow heading toward the barn and houses — great mood! My 2nd fave is the tomatoes on the windowsill. I think your grandfather and I share a love of tomatoes and the joy of watching them ripen on the windowsill. Thanks for posting these wonderful art works!
I’m quite sure Kurt’s grandfather intended two generic country boys, similar in size and age, coming home from some good sledding looking forward to a good supper – no more so than their dog! Almost a Rockwellian scenario.
But to Kurt it was a sort of Rorschach Test. When he saw the painting, he said, “That’s just like my brother, always making me pull the sled!”. Perhaps there was indeed a difference in their tuques…
I really said that? That surprises me, because the red tuque was always mine, and I would have recognized the kid wearing it as me. Maybe I didn’t look closely enough at who was pulling.
Curious.
re: Rockwell sledding scene – Kurt made the comment that Drawing Boy made a mistake in that I would’ve made Kurt pull the sled.
Thank you, Bits. Now everything makes sense.
That “tuque” is what my sibs and I called the boggy hat, and whoever had to wear it was the loser! I had to google the word and it’s Canadian, so another surprise for me because my mother is Canadian and has never said tuque or any of its variants.
I love all the paintings, but that covered bridge really calls out to me.
I admit “tuque” is a linguistic affectation of mine. I stole the word from the McKenzie Brothers when I was a teenager and have been using it ever since, but would not have used it when I was a child.
(I forget what I would have called those hats as a child. Maybe they were just hats. Or snow hats.)
Wool hat? Knit cap? All of this reminds me of Mike Nesmith:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knit_cap#Other_names
I would be inclined to call these things ski hats, except that I think if ski hats as having pom poms on top and apparently that makes it a “bobble hat,” which is different:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knit_cap#British_Bobble_Hat
Wow, thanks for sharing. The man at the barn/storage house door, love it. In Wyeth country, thinking A Wyeth. Hmmm…a final check to make sure everything is in good order before he closes that door. W Blumenau country.
[…] (my brother and I called him “Drawing Boy”) had been effortlessly turning out painted canvases and sketched caricatures for decades, with as much inborn natural grace as he used to remove a […]