Preface

This blog and a companion one (http://momtheartistparttwo.blogspot.com) make up a retrospective review of the artwork of my mother, Nancy Millicent deBeers Howard, from 1928 at age 9 to her death in 2006 at age 87. The current blog has this Preface and chapters 1-9; Part Two has chapters 10-19. (If for some reason typing in the web address doesn't bring it up, you can also access it by clicking on "My Complete Profile," in the right-hand margin of this text.) The chapters are of uneven size but have an average of about 14 images per chapter. This is less than a quarter of the total works in her possession at her death. Besides the artwork, this blog includes a text commentary by me, her eldest child, giving some background for the pieces.

This project started as a slide show done after Mom’s memorial service, to 20 or 30 people who pulled themselves away from the reception activity. I'm doing these two blogs to make her work accessible to more people, including people who may never have known her. The content follows the slide show, except that I have expanded my comments and added images that have come to my attention since (notably ones provided by brothers John and David, and sister-in-law Ronda). I have also incorporated all 12 images from a 2005 picture calendar using her work that was on display at the memorial. There are actually 20% more images here than at the memorial service. So even people who were at the slide show have reason to look at these blogs!

Since blogs are works in progress, please check the end of this preface each time you enter the site, for a description of what has been done when. I would appreciate any feedback. My wife Ela is the one whose idea it was that I should put Mom's work out as a blog, as opposed to mailing out CD's, and she showed me step-by-explicit-step how to do whatever it is that I've done.

The artworks themselves are the property of her estate, in her children’s possession, and none of them are for sale. Except for family, no reproductions of the work should be made from this blog without written permission from this blogger, Michael S. Howard, mh503@msn.com. I am planning a 2007 calendar with 12 of these works on it.

The images (as opposed to the artworks) are far from professional quality. I did them quickly, using either a scanner (which a few times cut out what did not fit on the glass plate) or a low-end camera in whatever natural light was available. I did most of the images while Mom was still alive, in hopes of getting her comments. She tended, however, to comment only on her current work. I am grateful for that.

On your computer, you may find some of the images uncomfortably small. The ones that are wider than they are high have been reduced by the blogger program to fit into the the text margins. For these, if you click on the image it will display in larger format. Then you use your browser (clicking on the green arrow at the top left of your screen) to go back to the text. You just wait a bit and it will put you back to where you left off.

I find that it takes about 15 seconds for the whole blog to reload after I've looked at an individual image. That's a bit long. However there is a trick you can use. Read the blog chapter by chapter, selecting the one you want by clicking on its title to the right of this preface. Then the computer will only have to reload that chapter after each picture you see in larger view, which is much faster than reloading the whole blog, less than a second, I find. At the end of the chapter, you can click on "home," and the computer will reload the whole thing for your next selection. Or you can go to the top of the page and click on the title of the next chapter, in the right margin, which loads faster. (Actually, it was to take advantage of this trick that I made two blogs instead of one. The blogging program gives you a maximum of 10 chapter headings per blog on its automatic setting. It will do more if you "customize," but that sounded too complicated for me.)

Even clicking on the image, you may find it too small. The painted images look best when they take up most of the available screen vertically; for images in ink, about two thirds of that. To enlarge the images, you'd have to reset temporarily the display settings on your computer. In Windows, you do that by clicking on "start" at the bottom left of your screen, then moving to "settings" and clicking on "control panel," then clicking on "display" and finally "settings" at the top of the page. There is a little bar near the middle you can move with the cursor. Set it to "800 x 600 pixels."

For reference purposes, I have given each image a number and a letter. The number originally corresponded to the chapter the image was in, but then I had to combine a few chapters for the blogs. The number and letter combinations still do their job, so I didn't bother to renumber them all.

The actual size of the artwork, as opposed to the images, varies a lot. Her ink sketches outdoors, including the ones to which she added small amounts of color, were almost always 5.5 by 8.5 inches. Her color sketches outdoors (not oils) were mostly 8.5 by 11 inches. Her oils vary in size, from 16 by 20 inches to 24 by 32 and even larger. The most popular size was 18 by 24. I will try to indicate when a canvas varies from that by more than 6 inches either way. Her studio sketches on paper are the same size as her oils or a little smaller: 18 by 24, give or take 6 inches.

The first blog is Mom's work up to 2004, when her health started declining. It is mostly work she did in her 70's, all of it magical and full of life. The second blog is devoted to work in her last year and a half, from 2004 to 2006, ages 85 to 87. Before 2004, her art was a part of her life that she shared on occasion, but did not try to impose on others. So I remained fairly ignorant of the process behind it. In 2004, she became more dependent on her children, and she was showing us her work as she did it. In consequence, I know a lot more about her last work. More than that, I think her last two years are the most interesting. Few artists have been able to express their farewell to life in art at so advanced an age, with so much artistic development already behind them, and with such focused intensity.

Read the chapters in order, because you need to see how well she mastered the conventions and techniques of her craft before going out totally on her own. Her last work can best be appreciated in the context of what came before. But be aware that the real breakthroughs in her work came after her strokes, at a time when her verbal communication and processing were confused and her daily activities radically impaired. It was a time when health professionals often applied the word “dementia” to her—-although not, let me make it clear, dementia of the Alzheimer’s variety. Fortunately, she could still do her art. In fact, it was under such conditions that she had both the necessity and the opportunity to focus her remaining creative powers on this work. The result is not just a memorial to her life. It is, not only in my opinion but also that of an art history professor who happened to be at the slide show, a unique and priceless contribution to the world of art.

PROGRESS REPORT: 10/12/06, chapter headings and the first few lines of each.
10/27/06: full preface, chapter 1, chapter 7.
10/28/07: chapter 2.
10/29/06 chapters 3-6.
10/30/06 chapter 7-9. Created 2nd blog. Chapters 18-19.
10/31/06. Revised texts, renumbered chapters, added chapters 10-17.
11/1/06, 11/2/06, 11/3/06. Revised prefaces. Minor editing. Resized some pictures.
11/7/06. Added ballroom dance sketches and one landscape sketch.

Chapter 1: Mom the artist, 1928-1952

Mom was born Nancy Millicent deBeers on March 6, 1919, in Evanston, Illinois. Her father was a chemical engineer and industrialist who by Mom’s birth had already made his fortune and was on the brink of retirement. They lived in the fashionable North Shore suburb of Glencoe close to Lake Michigan, on a tree-lined street of stately homes. Her mother had studied art at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and enjoyed some popularity as a painter of children’s portraits in the professional milieu in which they lived. She saved one newspaper clipping of her mother's (1a)



It was only natural that Nancy would follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her proud parents were quick to appreciate her talents. I remember a small framed drawing in my grandparents’ apartment shortly after they moved from Chicago to Rose Villa, a retirement center near Oregon City, the town where their daughter had moved 35 years earlier. My grandmother said, “Your mother did that when she was nine years old.” The sketch (1b) shows children playing on an inner city street, which Mom later told me was a Jewish tenement district on the South Side of Chicago.



Perhaps Mom had accompanied her dad there as he attended to his business and had been fascinated by the children playing in the street, such a different environment from her own broad lawns and set-back homes. The style is very much that of sketches she did 50 or 60 years later. I am in awe of Mom’s powers of observation. But when I see photos of her at that age I guess I am not surprised (1c).



Art lessons were part of Mom’s young life. I didn’t discover another early painting until shortly before she died, when I saw one that said on the back “Nancy deBeers, artist” and “age 13,” along with the names of its owner, Florence and Franklin de Beers (1d). I am not sure who wrote these words, and I am surprised neither Mom nor her mother ever mentioned it. The style is so different from anything else she did. One might wonder whether the words on the back are accurate, and whether it is really hers. But I see no reason not to trust these words. Perhaps she was just doing what she was taught, trying out a realist style that did not fit her personal temperament.



At Rockford College, then a private women’s college, Mom continued taking art classes, although her major subjects were dance and anthropology. The caption to the newspaper photo (1e)says that the the three students were dancing to Mendelssohn’s music for Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mom would be the dancer in the middle:



Among the artworks Mom left behind is a sketch with the title “Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene I, Titania” (1f). It was likely done in the 1980’s or 90’s. It goes to show how connected her art was with her dance.



After graduation Mom attended a dance summer school at Mills College, under the direction of Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Then she studied painting at the Art Students’ League in New York City. Her teachers included some of the great artists of Europe, refugees from the tumult there. Her favorite teacher, she told me, was Raphael Soyer, a Russian-Jewish emigre. Certainly the portraits she did later show his influence. At the League she met her first husband Richard Anderson, whom she described as a poet. The Anderson family saved a few of his poems, and they are good ones. Possibly his income came from modeling.

After a couple of years Mom and Richard divorced. He apparently could not adapt to settling down and raising a family. She had a brief stint teaching dance, in Chicago with the Sybil Shearer Dance Group, where she also did choreography, and in the art colony town of Saugatuck, Michigan. I remember waiting at the Episcopal Church after nursery school for Mom to finish her class. Then she married John Howard, a native Oregonian who met my mother while sight-seeing back East. One of them had placed a personals ad and the other responded. One of the first things she did when we moved into our new home—where Mom would stay for 38 years—was to paint an exotic train scene on the closet door to the boys’ bedroom (1h):



When my brother David was back for Mom's memorial service, he discovered another piece she did and e-mailed a photo (1i). To this day there hangs in Park Place School, where we kids attended grades 1-6, a drawing she did of the original wood building, which was torn down in 1948 and replaced with the current brick structure.



We never found her other work from the 1940’s. She kept it in the attic, but when we helped her move in 2005 we could find nothing. The piece that had made the biggest impression on us kids, playing in the attic when our parents weren’t around, was one with a skull and chessboard, suggesting the vagaries of fortune in the face of careful planning. The only evidence we have of it now is a newspaper clipping she kept, from around 1952 (1j):



There it is, in the center of the photo. The painting on the left shows how the farm looked then, with a dirt road downhill from the house leading to our barn. Old maps, she told us, showed a road there, connecting what is now a dead end road, ending with us, to Forsythe Road below us. So what was for us the back of the house was originally the front, she said. The painting on the right is of a child, probably Johnny.

After that, for 20 years, Mom sketched mainly on our summer vacations. Her creative energy went mostly into raising nine children and writing, both a newspaper column, “Nancy’s Notions,” and children’s stories, one of which became the book Three Billies Go to Town, published by Parents’ Magazine Press. The illustrations for these stories were done by the magazines’ own illustrators. They probably didn’t even know of Mom’s other talents.

Chapter 2: Vacation sketches, 1955-1985

Our next evidence of Mom’s artistic production is in March of 1965, a newspaper story announcing an exhibit of her work at the public library in Milwaukie, Oregon, north of where we lived in Oregon City (2a).



I do not recognize the work that Mom is holding. But we do still have the work that Dr. Martin, President of the Friends of the Milwaukie Library, is putting against the wall (2b).



My impression is that in 1963 that painting had been selected for the Biennial of the Portland Art Museum, a showcase for the best in local art over the previous two years. It is of East Lake, where we used to vacation every July. I would guess that the lines signify her connection to the objects in view: the boats, the lake, and the mountains beyond.

Among the sketches Mom saved over the years, several come from such vacations, of prime fishing spots in Central Oregon. This combination of ink with a sparing use of color is something she would continue all her life (2c-h).


















There is even one sketch of our campsite (2i). Besides this big tent, other smaller tents held various children. That way we didn’t have to listen to Dad’s snoring!



After our trips to Central Oregon in July, we would go to the Oregon Coast in August. There we boys and Dad would go out fishing, either in the ocean or the bay, and again Mom would usually stay in camp. Their favorite campground was at Eel Creek south of Reedsport. Housekeeping was not that easy. To get water, we had to pump it by hand. Supplies were a half mile at Ten Mile Lake. The campgound was separated from the ocean by miles of pristine sand dunes, which besides being a great place to play also kept children out of danger. For Mom the dunes were a source of artistic inspiration (2j-k):






Of course not all our time was spent at the dunes. We also went to the beach, and Mom sketched there as well (2l-n).









In the fall Dad would go hunting, October for deer and November for elk. He sometimes took us boys along. He often brought back meat, and we ate it all winter. I am just as glad nobody ever shot anything when I was along! In her art Mom treated hunting as power, for good or for ill. She wrote one of her newspaper columns about “the hunter” in dramatic terms which no doubt embarrassed Dad. She also did one painting on the theme, labeled “The Hunter” on the back (2o). To me it is reminiscent of aboriginal art in New Guinea, with its larger than life representations of the warrior’s demonic power. Perhaps she was harking back to her days as an anthropology major in college.

Chapter 3: Studying the masters, 1988-90

Starting in the 1960's, Mom resumed taking art classes, at the Portland Art Museum'’s Art School, with such local artists as Louis Bunce and Michele Russo. From them, as from her New York teachers earlier, she learned abstraction and composition. She continued her studies in the 70's and 80'’s. For a while it was at Marylhust College, under art-loving nuns. Then after her husband died in 1987 she entered the docent program at the Portland Art Museum, with the idea of leading tours through the museum. She did some of that, but her real love was painting itself. She did her versions of paintings she liked, mostly from the French impressionists. Monet was her favorite. Here is Mom's version of his "Bridge at Argenteuil" (3a):



In another, the painting she is working from is Monet's "Red Boats, Argenteuil" (3b)



One painting of Mom'’slooks like she was seeing our own waterways from a Monet-ish perspective (3c).



Another painting (3d) is Mom's take on a famous Mary Cassat painting, "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair." Mom would have seen the originals for 3b and 3d at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., on one of her visits to her son John.



There is also her "“Conversation with Bonnard"” (3e), her version of his "Table Set in a Garden."



You can see images of the originals that Mom was working on Google. You click on "images,"” type in the name of the painting, and click on "search." If you compare the originals to Mom's versions, you will see what she is doing. She is abstracting from the impressionists, removing details yet preserving the essence of the scene and the aesthetic effect. For example, Cassat's brocaded chair becomes solid blue. It is the opposite of what is fashionable these days. Thanks to technology, cameras are getting finer and finer detail in their images, and the most sought-after artists are following the trend. Mom is aiming at less and less, while not getting away from representation altogether. Through abstraction, she is helping us to see the beauty all around us In her vacation drawings (chapter 2), she drew the expanse of a sand dune in a few well-chosen lines. Here she is doing the same even while filling the canvas with paint and color.

Two months before Mom died, I took her to the Portland Art Museum. She called out artists’ names to me as they appeared in the distance. She showed me one painting she said she copied, "“Girl with an Accordion"” by the Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Her painting, however, leaves out the accordion (3f). Mom focused on the girl. Kuniyoshi was one of her teachers at the Art Students League in 1941-1942.



After Mom died, I heard a story that might be about that painting. Around that time, the late 1980's, Mom was the Secretary of the Clackamas County Loaves and Fishes. A friend of mine who was also on the board, Ed Smith, recalls her telling him she had copied a painting in the Portland Art Museum. The artist'’s wife had died, and Mom told my friend that in copying the painting she experienced all the artist's grief. Of course Mom's husband had just died, too. So perhaps there was some of her own grief in that experience.

I wondered if Kuniyoshi's painting might have been the one she had in mind. Perhaps she even knew who the "girl with the accordian" was, since she studied with him. I researched Kuniyoshi on the Web. He died in 1953. His first wife, Katherine Schmidt, died in 1978. His second wife, Sara Mazo, is apparently still alive (on the Web, she shows up as guest of honor at a benefit in August, 2003.) However one commentator, writing about a 2004 Kuniyoshi retrospective in Tokyo, does observe that his later portraits of women reflect "“grief and emptiness." It occurs to me that perhaps Kuniyoshi was grieving Katherine Schmidt's leaving him, a grief that perhaps never resolved. Although Schmidt divorced Kuniyoshi in 1932, she still associated with him. The Web has a photo of the two of them together in 1940. Both were artists, and both were members of "enemy" groups in the 1930's and 40's, he Japanese and she unapologetically German-American. So they continued to have much in common. There is a fascinating "“oral history" interview with Schmidt on the Web that describes their relationship.. The parallel with Mom's life is then the loss of both her husbands, one to divorce and the other to death.

Around this time, too, Mom toured Europe with her friend Diana Marsden, an American who lived in England with her British husband but who visited the US often and had become close friends with Mom. The two of them bought Eurail passes and stayed in youth hostels. Mom'’s favorite places were Giverney, Monet's home in his later years, and Salzburg, where Diana says Mom spent eight full hours in the Mozart Museum. Salzburg is also the setting for Mom's favorite movie, "The Sound of Music." Together they got to see many of her favorite artworks, and the views that inspired them.

Mom was now ready to take up painting again in a serious way. In the 1990's and the first four years of the 21st century, her art bloomed as never before, and she left us hundreds of absolutely magical artworks. Since few of them are dated--or signed, for that matter—--rather than going by date I will present them by category: still lives, nudes, dancers, musicians, portraits generally, landscapes, and finally Mom's equivalent of Giverney, the public parks where the Clackamas River flows into the Willamette, to which she kept returning again and again.

Chapter 4: Still lives and nudes 1990-2003

After Europe and the Portland Art Museum docent program, Mom started taking classes at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City. It was close to home and had a marvelous program led by local painter Leland John. She supplemented these classes with membership in the Brush and Palette Art Association in Gladstone, the town just north of Oregon City on the other side of the Clackamas River. They had Saturday morning painting sessions with live models. Mom framed some of the products of this studio work, at CCC and Brush and Palette, but left most of her work in four or five large portfolios, where it remains.

The foundation of this studio work is the still life. Objects pose for far less money than a live model, and one gets to try out various media and techniques. For Mom, plants were her favorite subject. Here is one of flowers (4a):



In another one (4b) we get a table, vase, silver plate, and drapes as well. The drapes are especially well done, showing both the folds and the play of light on their surface.



In another (4c), Mom uses the flower arrangement as an excuse to arrange colors and shapes in a Matisse-like composition.



In the next one (4d), the wood, which appears lifeless at first glance, is really a pruned tree trunk. The life within is suggested by the green leaves around it.



Next (4e) we have another Matisse-like creation, with the familiar triad of flower, vase, and table:



All her work so far is full of life, but none has the mystery I used to associate with the skull and chessboard still life of her earlier days. For mysteriousness, I found only a few examples in her portfolios. One (4f) has animal skulls arranged in a ghastly sort of way.



Another (4g) is more fantasy than a drawing from nature. And since it features a cat and some bats, it is not exactly a still life either. The blank rectangle at the bottom suggests that it is designed to be something you paste into the inside cover of a book and put your name in.



My final example (4h) has the mysteriousness of ruins and Greek statues without arms. In this case, a sculptured bust stands alone, severing all but the head, shoulders, and upper chest, while a severed hand mysteriously appears alongside the pedestal.



Another part of Mom’s studio classes was drawing nudes. Mom doesn’t have many; I will show you about a third of the total. Only two are oils, of which I will show one (5a):



The rest (5b-d) are pastels or pastels plus ink.









These nudes show Mom’s delight in the human form, even when it is much younger than her own. The hand that drew the youthful figure of Slide 5d was itself wrinkled and a little arthritic from age (5e). By now Mom was in her mid-70’s.

Chapter 5: Dancers

By training, Mom was as much a dancer as a painter. But it was less acceptable and safe for a 75 year old to be dancing on stage. In general, it was more satisfying for her to put dance in her paintings. One way was by painting dancers. Mom knew exactly how dancers held themselves and moved. So when her classes brought in dancers as models, it was a natural for her. She was also becoming adept with pastels at that time. So she could follow her master in this area, the impressionist Degas, in a new way that fit her abstractionist bent. In these first two (6a-b), notice her use of color in the background to intensify the mood of the scene.





The class at Clackamas Community College was fortunate in being able to get actual ballet dancers from a ballet class at the college to serve as models. I remember Mom ecstatically showing me her work from that time, how pleased she was with her new work and especially at being able to have ballet dancers as models, Degas' own subjects. Again, pastels were her favorite medium (6c, 6d, 6e).





Sometimes she would use simple black lines on white (6f):



Sometimes she did the same model twice, once in pastel and once in oil (6g-h).






Something Degas did not have the opportunity to do was to paint a dark-skinned ballet dancer. Mom took advantage of the contrasting colors and added a complementary background (6i).



In all the depictions so far, the dancers are professional and the mood elevated. Mom was not, however, above drawing ordinary people simply dancing to have fun. I will end this chapter with selections from a small sketchbook I discovered after her death, only 3.5 by 4.75 inches in size. So do not bother clicking on the images: they about as large as you see them already.













And there are also the musicians who fuel all this energy:







Dance and music are enduring themes in Mom's art. We will be visiting them again.