The Truth About Gardens
In fourth grade my family moved from the center of Kansas to western New York state. This was a cultural shock to all of us and the home that we moved into, originally a stagecoach inn, was built in 1832 and haunted. The entire tiny hamlet was rich with energy and life and spirits coming and going. No time was this more true than in the fall when the gardens were left dormant and the trees began to lose their leaves. It was a rich and vibrant time and it made my blood race. There was life in every shadow, under every rock, in the deserted gardens and half frozen fields. It seemed like everything took on a life of its own. The pumpkins and apples and gourds rose up out of the brown and decaying gardens and moved silently around our neighborhood. There was the world that was always there and there was the world that you only saw out of the corner of your eye. The half seen and the imagined. The life that rose up out of orchards and pumpkin patches and piles of leaves. I have been forever changed by the rich energy of New York Autumns.
I spent the first 9 years of my life in the tiny farming village of Plevna, Kansas surrounded by corn and wheat fields and miles and miles of flat. The summers were scorchingly hot and the winters were bitterly cold and icy. The wind at night jiggled my windows and the trees outside tapped and scraped on the side of the house. I used to think that snowmen would come each night after everyone was asleep, tap at my windows to wake me up and take me on adventures.
In order to join them on these adventures I would become an ice girl. I took a plastic carrot from my fake food collection and with dull scissors cut off one end and made too very small holes for string to make my own carrot nose. As an adult, I look back and think that I must have been a very strange child. In this way, when I became the ice child I could wear my plastic carrot nose and fit in with the other snowmen.
In the late 70’s I used to tell my own children about the ice girl and the snowmen. I began drawing pictures of them in colored pencil and watercolor. We were desperately poor and much of what we did was homemade.
In 1999 I did my first oil painting of one of the snowmen and the colors were so rich and lovely and so reminiscent of my dreams that I found them very fulfilling and fun to paint and I have been painting them ever since.
They have gone through many incarnations and perhaps have always been representative of how I am feeling at the time. Some are patient and subdued and some are vibrant and active.
The colors are especially important to me. I love light against dark, blue against orange, cold next to warm. Each element is enhanced by the element next to it.
I have seen many other stories about Snowmen and Snowmen at night and I have come to believe that many children must have had Snowmen tapping at their windows at night, beckoning them on to adventures.