Personal Note: Heirlooms
Mar. 2nd, 2008 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweMy family isn't big into heirlooms, so I don't own many things that I haven't bought myself or been given as presents in the here-and-now, or that would be worth preserving for the next generation as Antiques Roadshow-bait. There's the 400-day clock my father bought fifty years ago in Germany that I hauled to the horologist and got working again (though it still loses about five minutes a day), and the page from a fifteenth-century Italian gradual that I purchased at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair when I still thought I was going to be a professional medievalist, and the J.K. Rowling U.K. first editions that will be financing my retirement someday. :-) But when I consider what I want to give my niece and nephew so they can have a sense of family history beyond the generations with which they're acquainted, I think of my grandfather's paintings.
My paternal grandfather was a civil engineer and an amateur artist. (There's a serious creative/inventive streak on my father's side of the family. I have some collateral relatives who evidently tried to make a living as songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley period, and one day I will discover whether my great-grandfather patented a machine to extract gold from quartz before disappearing out West, as legend has it. My mother's people are more pragmatic and jolly; the family stories from that side tend to involve jokes, like the WWI-era tale about the baker-relative who was told by the artillery that his biscuits could substitute for ammunition in a pinch.) Anyway, my grandfather enjoyed painting seascapes, and I inherited three of his smaller works when I got my first apartment: a woman in a boat with blue-and-yellow sails riding across choppy green-and-yellow water at midday; a small sailboat poised off a peaceful, reedy shore at twilight (he liked this subject so much he did it twice; the other one hangs in my parents' bedroom); and an unfinished one of a sailboat drawn up on an empty beach. My grandfather was no Turner (his stuff's a lot less dramatic, for one), but each of these pictures has a good feel to it, in my inexpert opinion. He was clearly interested in light and color and in showing their different "textures" in sea and sky. I think he was better at representing stillness than motion, though that may be my personal aesthetic showing. I love that twilit boat with its gleaming white sail and its passengers suggested in silhouette; I love the way the long brown-green-yellow shoreline bisects the background: pale cloudy sky deepening to indigo in one direction, and darker blue water reflecting the boat and its sail and the rock and reeds in the foreground. At home in my parents' living room is another painting I like even better of a Chinese junk against a brilliantly colorful sunset -- it's one of the few things I've specifically asked my parents to leave me in their will. My brother and sister-in-law can have the china and the Waterford crystal. I want the paintings, so that I can hang them all over the house and say to people, "My grandfather was a civil engineer and an amateur artist ..."
My paternal grandfather was a civil engineer and an amateur artist. (There's a serious creative/inventive streak on my father's side of the family. I have some collateral relatives who evidently tried to make a living as songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley period, and one day I will discover whether my great-grandfather patented a machine to extract gold from quartz before disappearing out West, as legend has it. My mother's people are more pragmatic and jolly; the family stories from that side tend to involve jokes, like the WWI-era tale about the baker-relative who was told by the artillery that his biscuits could substitute for ammunition in a pinch.) Anyway, my grandfather enjoyed painting seascapes, and I inherited three of his smaller works when I got my first apartment: a woman in a boat with blue-and-yellow sails riding across choppy green-and-yellow water at midday; a small sailboat poised off a peaceful, reedy shore at twilight (he liked this subject so much he did it twice; the other one hangs in my parents' bedroom); and an unfinished one of a sailboat drawn up on an empty beach. My grandfather was no Turner (his stuff's a lot less dramatic, for one), but each of these pictures has a good feel to it, in my inexpert opinion. He was clearly interested in light and color and in showing their different "textures" in sea and sky. I think he was better at representing stillness than motion, though that may be my personal aesthetic showing. I love that twilit boat with its gleaming white sail and its passengers suggested in silhouette; I love the way the long brown-green-yellow shoreline bisects the background: pale cloudy sky deepening to indigo in one direction, and darker blue water reflecting the boat and its sail and the rock and reeds in the foreground. At home in my parents' living room is another painting I like even better of a Chinese junk against a brilliantly colorful sunset -- it's one of the few things I've specifically asked my parents to leave me in their will. My brother and sister-in-law can have the china and the Waterford crystal. I want the paintings, so that I can hang them all over the house and say to people, "My grandfather was a civil engineer and an amateur artist ..."