Calendar Series: 27th Month / Sleepless Night with Bridge to Morning (1988)

My mother's mother's female ancestors have been traced as far back as 1790 in Drumhecknagh, Kilmore Parish, County Cavan, Ireland. 

In 1836, my great-great grandmother, Jane Bennett, then 9 years old, was working on an embroidered sampler. In 1837, her family left Ireland and settled in Quebec, near New Hampshire. The unfinished sampler was passed down from mother to daughter, from New Hampshire to Boston to St. Paul, Minnesota until it came to me in Washington State. 

Because I have no children and no possibility of female nieces in this generation, I have passed it on to a cousin who is my mother's great niece and who lives in California, in hopes that it will continue to be passed down the female line. While working on the Calendar Series, I looked at the 19th century embroidered sampler and felt a distinct kinship with that 9-year-old girl from County Cavan, Ireland. I am fairly sure that I added the alphabet to this painting with the sampler in mind, although when I got to the end of the alphabet, I began to make it into a palindrome and then followed no order. When I tried to upload the image of the sampler, I got error messages. Several further attempts were also unsuccessful, but I will try later today. Am unable to upload the complete image but can upload this detail:

Sleepless Woman with Moon and Birds (1983)

It required some thinking before I could remember the name of this drawing. It wasn't until around 1987 that I began to write down the names that I gave to my drawings and paintings. Once again, I am finding that looking back at my work is a good exercise of my memory. 

This drawing has a connection to a poem I wrote in the early 1980's called "A Nation of Sleepless Women," which I posted yesterday. I was disappointed in the way the color of the image came through the first time I uploaded it because it had a cold blue look. The true image has much warmer blues. All of the colors are warmer, and even the black area is a warmer black. So, I went into iPhoto to see if I could remedy that. I clicked on "adjustments" and began playing with the brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness and exposure. I even discovered how to straighten the photo! What a revelation! The only thing I couldn't adjust to my satisfaction was the color up against the woman's face. The red near the woman's face in the first uploaded image is more like the original red. In the original image on paper, it is a red with more blue in it than orange. Of course, seeing a reproduction is not the same as seeing a drawing, but I got as close as I could to the spirit of the original drawing in the second uploaded image.

Just to see what it would look like, I made it into a black and white image.