Looking back in wonder

Garden Flowers in a glass jug

Pen and ink and coloured pencil

8 1/2 x 11 inches

© Barbara Muir
(I was not a good at photos back then)

My art training was classical.  Ideally most of our teachers would
have wanted us to be part of the Florence School of Art, learning

to paint like Renaissance painters.  One of the best things we learned

was how to have an "eye" -- meaning we really looked at what we
were trying to capture.

This drawing was at my mother's house, but "disappeared" after she
died, probably sold off for nothing by the relative handling the 
dispersal of my mother's possessions. Finding it in my blog
made me happy.  I learned so much in the two years I studied
art post high school.

Here's what I said about these drawings in a former blog post:

"The concept of selling my art came to me years ago when

we started to go to therapy to help us adjust to the
early tensions of parenting a new baby.  We were lucky
I think, because my sister is a therapist, and it was very
natural for us to seek and get help from one of her colleagues.
After a couple of months working out what seemed to be
giant epiphanies at the time, and what seem now to be the basics of
practical couple decision making, Steven got up
the nerve to say that he needed me to make money.

I was shocked.  Hadn't I had a baby only eight short
months earlier?  Did he mean he wanted me to be a
mother, and earn an income?!!!  He did, and the therapist
supported that notion.  The drawing tonight is a sample
of those early works for sale.  I am always delighted when
I go to my mother's house and see them.  Done in pen and
ink with a straight pen, Indian ink, and coloured in in
pro level coloured pencil, they seem shockingly detailed
to me now.  But they are still beautiful in an intensely
obsessive way.  I was trying to be a botanical artist, and
succeeded at this for several years.  In fact I drew these
images in straight sessions, spending 16 hours a day
producing them, with a baby at my feet.  Is it any wonder
that that baby is an incredibly hard worker today?  Or
that he's grown up to enter the arts field?  I guess not.

Have an honouring-your-young-sweet-naive-searching-self day."