Living in the present, looking back in time / Boundless Love

My grandfather visited Killarney and from there went to the Gap of Dunloe via Pony and Trap after returning from France in World War I, where he served as a doctor. From the Gap of Dunloe, he walked to a high place where he could see Black Valley. He describes this in a letter to my grandmother who was at home with their young children, my mother and my uncle, in Hastings, Minnesota, waiting for his return.

My grandfather was 48 years old at the time.  My mother was 3 years old.  My uncle was 8.  My grandmother was 34.

My grandfather was born of German immigrant parents in Boston.  My grandmother's family in Boston had roots in Canada, Ireland, England and Scotland.  I was born in California but have lived in Washington State since I was 24 years old.  After leaving Europe in the 1800s, every generation of my family has moved great distances from where the previous generation settled.  Prior to that, they lived for generations in the same general areas in Norway, Germany, Ireland, England and Scotland.  When I go to YouTube and look at film footage showing where my ancestors lived and traveled, the landscape looks familiar to me.

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Looking at a lifetime of art work

From 1955 when I was five years old:

to 1966:

to 1974:

to 1982:

to 1983:

to 1986:

to "First Calendar" (1987):

to

 "Untitled" (1990)"

to

"Calendar Series:  62nd Month / Self-Portrait with Brothers of Mercy and Night Falling from the Sky" (1990)

to Mandala #1 (2014):

to "Left-Handed Untitled Unfinished" (July 2022)

to  Mandala #69:  Left-Handed Self-Portrait Drawn from Memory of Imaginary Brothers and Boundless Love 

(July 2022)

It just occurred to me, as I have finished Mandala #69,  that there were 71 paintings in my Calendar Series, begun in 1987 and finished in 1992, after which I found myself less and less able to sit down at my art table for any extended period of time due to emotional turmoil that I thought would never end.  2014 was a turning point.  Sustainable creative energy returned.  It was beginning to wane again, when I discovered I could draw with my left hand in early January of 2022.  Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and all that has followed this year, I've not done as much drawing as in previous years but the creative energy is there, beyond my wildest dreams.

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I'm going to stay here in this beautiful cloudy place, in this community, doing yoga, reading, drawing with my left hand, blogging, walking with friends, doing what I can against all odds, no matter what happens.  When the sun shines here, it is beautiful in another way.

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"Boundless Love"

NO MAN'S LAND / WOUNDED AND DEAD / COMING HOME

This quote from Robert Pirsig posted today at In A Dark Time in a discussion of LILA: AN INQUIRY INTO MORALS,


"The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or a horse returning riderless with the title, “Bad News.” Death was acknowledged by an occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven.

World War I wasn’t like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half million rotting corpses, some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some with- out faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered in one battle alone.

Those who survived suffered a stunnedness, and a lostness and felt bitter toward the society that could do that to them. They joined the faith that intellect must find some way out of old Victorian “nobility” and “virtue” into a more sane and intelligent world. In an instant it seemed, the snobbish fashionable Victorian social world was gone,"



prompted me to find the above photographs because I have always been struck by the unequivocal weariness in my grandfather's face as he was photographed while sitting between and distant from my subdued-looking mother and her brother with his enigmatic expression. It was 1919, and my grandfather had just returned to the United States from World War I where he had served as a doctor. My grandfather, the only surviving son of German immigrants whose first American-born son died of cholera, had worked as newspaper typesetter in his 20s and had gone to medical school at Harvard at night when he was in his 30s, possibly attending lectures by the psychologist and philosopher, William James. In 1917, when my mother was 1 year old and my uncle was 9 years old, my then 47-year-old grandfather entered the army as a doctor and served in France until the last days of World War I. The photo was taken in Natick, Massachusetts where my grandmother's relatives lived. My grandparents had married in Boston in 1906. During the time my grandfather was gone, my grandmother spent part of the time in Gulfport, Mississippi with relatives and then must have taken a train to Natick to meet my grandfather when he returned to the United States in 1919, before returning to St. Paul, Minnesota.

My mother told me that her father had told her that he was "not near the battlefront and that not much was happening where he was," but by the look on his face I don't think he wanted to talk about the war.

After my mother died, my grandfather's camera, photographs, letters, documents and other artifacts came to me. The World War I photos in France are ones that he bought in London after the war.