A woman in a kerchief carrying a pail! I almost missed her. I was so taken with the child-like colors and shapes in this painting that I didn't see the woman walking into the picture from the far left.
This painting is by Margret Hofheinz-Döring (1910–1994). Many of her paintings have been donated to the public domain by Margret Hofheinz-Döring/ Galerie Brigitte Mauch Göppingen. What a lovely gift to the world! This one is titled "Alpine Pasture" ("Auf der Alm"). I am surprised to see what look like longhorn cattle here. But then the word "alpine" makes me think of Heidi and goats, instead of cattle.
I found Margret because I love Wendell Berry's poem about the "peace of the wild things" and was looking through WikiCommons for paintings of wild things. Suddenly here was this painting and this artist I had never heard of before. She created 9,000 works of art in her lifetime. I am so in awe of this. She makes me want to jump up this very minute and start working at my art table.
I have the great good fortune to have a room of my own. My husband and I live in a 1929 fixer-upper bungalow, with two little bedrooms and two baths (which is a luxury of luxuries). Since the garage is his workroom, I got the smaller of the two bedrooms for my own. We call it the boxroom because, when we first moved in, everything in boxes went into it. And it is still full of boxes. But I like its cozy crowded cluttered comfiness.
Here is another of Margret's paintings, titled "Children" ("Kindergarten"). I love the colors, the children holding hands (perhaps), the overall child-like look of this, but what I particularly love is that she has painted right onto the frame. She simply kept on going. I picture her painting right off the frame and onto the floorboards, out her front door, down the street, into the big world.
I know her work is very deceptively simple, but, because of that, it makes me feel that I could paint like that, too! This one looks like finger painting, doesn't it? Last summer I bought some sticks of Crayola modeling clay and let myself just play with it, making shapes, mixing the colors, turning red and blue into purple. Hmmmmmm. Now I'm thinking of getting some finger paints . . .
Here is my art table this morning, about 4 o'clock, in the early morning dark that I love so much. A clutter of tissue paper, my sketch of Tatiana from yesterday's post (I enlarged the pencil drawing 150%), my scissors, and some see-through flowered fabric, which I would love to use for her skirt or her top, but I'm afraid the flowers in the pattern are too large or she is too small.
This is what my table looks like most of the time. Worse, actually. I removed the newspaper, the jar of coffee (to remind me to buy more), the folder, the notebook, the to-do list, the empty candle box, etc. etc.
Someone gave me this roll of tissue paper, all swiss-dots, many colors. I'm shamed to say I've had it for years, and I no longer remember who the dear person was who gave it to me. I've been saving it. I think it is time I used it!
And here is my first try at creating Tatiana out of paper. Her hair and boots are Canson art paper, and I made her top and skirt out of the tissue paper.
It always amazes me how such tiny fragments can trick the eye into seeing more than is really there!
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Edited to add for Mendofleur, the words to Wendell Berry's poem:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
