Ma was in her mid-eighties and on one of her winter visits. She used my studio area in the daytime to paint and every night, befoe she went to bed, she wove little doilies on a string loom.Since she wove while sitting in that same spot several nights in a row it seemed to be a good opportunity to paint her portrait. I straddled a chair backwards, propped my canvas against the back and began the basic work. For two nights in a row, she barely acknowledged that she was the subject of my painting. When it was bedtime she would put away her loom and walk by me without a glance at the canvas. This was partially because her night vision was not the best.
On the third night I began to paint in the details, like wrinkles, and she had lots of them. In the bright light of the following morning, her attitude changed and she was plenty interested. She carried her breakfast coffee to the studio and stood in front of the painting. She was looking it over thoroughly and she was not pleased. She set down the cup, and with her forefinger applied a little friction over offending parts of the wet canvas. "What are these?" she asked. I watched as she rubbed the wet canvas and several wrinkles disappeared under her fingertip. "Wrinkles, Mom," I answered.
"And what are these?" she asked, as she again applied her magic finger to rub out another mass of wrinkles. I watched as the years dropped from her painted image. Once she had revised and eliminated the wrinkles in this manner, she liked the painting. I ended up leaving the face just the way she had rubbed it.
She wasn't too pleased with the "knobby" hands and didn't buy my explanation that these were the hands of woman who had worked very hard. She was a treasure.
