From health update to trip to the Sans Souci Museum
featuring Robert’s art.

There is nothing new to report except that yesterday, the physician’s assistant I spoke to indicated that those who are in the Covid unit are treated for Covid and all other issues are secondary. Life is on hold. A person can test positive for covid for weeks after infection. Finally, the team meeting is scheduled for Monday afternoon. I’ll see what the plan is.

I find myself looking back at creations that touched me in earlier days. Bring together color, tactility, words and a special moment and you have exceptional art.

Robert loves Americana and created art from the places he visited in his travels. He focused on simplicity and grace. He found elegance in the uncomplicated, quotidien moments. There was just one issue with his interpretations of painted renderings: he is very much red/green colorblind. He saw the world largely as gray, brown, yellow, blue. I often had to mix his paints. One thing we had in common was photography. After our first trip we lined up our his and hers slide projectors side by side and could virtually superimpose our photographs.

Let’s begin here.

Gallery 1
Mixed Media

And so I fell in love with the soul that created this art: rolled clay pressed into tiles with the poetry of Donald Justice, fired and set into found wood; the back of a child’s discarded chair crowns this 4 foot + piece. 1973

 

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Waterhole. This
Is Kansas. The
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer’s
Sons asleep
In their workclothes

by Donald Justice, 1967

 

 

The Minutemen of Gilmanton 1974
Cut-out photos and lettering, postcard, rubber stamps, and oil paint on wood

From Mary Butler’s Ride
~B.F. Taylor (?)

The plowman turned his cattle out;
He saddled up the bay,
And he rallied out
the wilderness upon that summer day,
And the Minute Men of Gilmanton
To Boston marched away.

 

 

 

Maine, an Island
Glazed tile with rubber stamp lettering
and oil paint on wood 1976

 

I came
upon the
graveyard
gate still hung from
its hand hammered
hinges on a cedar
post and I found
the small sad
headstones
of children’s
graves.

 

 

Anniversary tiles

 

 

 

Lithograph 1973

 

Poem/folk music by Norman Studer, Catskill Mountain folklorist. Mr. Studer was a big influence on Robert at Camp Woodland.

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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