My mother is an artist. I've always known that at some level, yet I was reminded of it again a few weeks ago. I found some photos she took back in the 60s. Granted, they were photos of me as a small child, so there is of course some bias. It's not the subject, but the way the photos turned out that impressed me. I've been studying photography for a while, and for the past year have been trying to master the skill.
Photography has always been an interest for me. I used to get the Kodak catalog from Sears as a child and read, dreaming of the day when I would have enough money to buy an enlarger and develop my own prints. Now with one hour development, that's all in the past. I'll just concentrate on capturing the image, playing with light and exposure to frame just the right image.
I just looked at those photos and saw the results of someone with an eye for a photo that I wish I had. Mom has always been a shutterbug, but using a instamatic or some other point-and-shoot device that she could whip out in a moment's notice. She always had a camera in her hand, asking us to stop and smile so she could take a photo. She's endured many groans and complaints, smiling, just so she could save a snapshot and place it in the drawer in a dresser long over-filled with memories on Kodak paper.
Besides her amateur photography she loves to plant, her home surrounded by pots and planters filled with enough plants to rival any plant house. Her greatest talent was wrapping gifts. A skill she learned back in the 40s and 50s at a small gift shop in her hometown as a young girl, she can create flowers out of ribbon and the finished gifts look like wedding cakes with flowers and ribbons.
Now, in her seventies, her once thin and nimble fingers are showing signs of arthritis, and the subjects in her photographs have their heads missing, she still loves plants and flowers. Never wealthy, nor a member of the country club set, my mother is as much an artist as her limited resources would allow. With the limited time she had raising children, and working ironing clothes for neighbors, she still is rich in creativity and imagination.
