She created awesome paper dolls and the girls loved it, especially Emma. My daughters are twenty-one and almost sixteen and they still talk about Nana’s paper dolls.
In October, Nana came to visit and she stumbled into my fascination with art created using book pages. She became my ironing assistant, flattening all the pages after I painted or dyed them. I fell in love with the smell of hot paper and Mom sort of understood why I enjoy tearing up books and creating stuff with them.
“This keeps the books alive, Mom. If I didn’t do this, where would this book be? It would be gathering dust on a shelf or in a box in an attic or worse, in a landfill.”
She was hesitant at first, but toward the end of her visit, she agreed to try to understand.
I also learned during that visit at one time she had career aspirations to be an illustrator. I knew she was talented with drawing and creating things like paper dolls and a favorite memory was sitting alongside her while she sketched some houses for one of her Junior League events, but somehow it never dawned on me she would have wanted to take her art and create a career from it.
Now when I go to book sales, looking for content, I look for illustrations that remind me of Mom’s paperdolls, which usually look like little girls from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.
This week I took a couple 1950’s books and made an instant homage to my Mom and her one-time dream.
The little girl (complete with shadow, which I love) was in a California Reading Text book called Magic Windows, published in 1957. The background is from a textbook titled Harmony which was published in the early 1940’s. I painted the squares and then combined the two.
I love how it turned out.
I can’t stop looking at it.
Every time I glance at it I remember my Mom’s dream and am grateful to have that inspiration to continue to follow my dreams, no matter my age.
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