Bear Paw Meanderings

It is September and that is the birthday of America’s famous painter, Grandma Moses.

She came from a very large Vermont family and had ten children herself. She worked and worked and worked and when she was in her 60’s or 70’s and her fingers would not work well enough for quilting and such, she took up painting, mainly water colors. Her subject matter was what was happening around her in her beloved Vermont Mountains.

She was called a primitive painter or of the rustic genre and her paintings were sort of primitive but they were full of people doing various things, lots of action and she painted all walks of Vermont life and all seasons of the year.

I got interested in Grandma Moses paintings around 1960 when I realized that I would be living in a cabin much of my life probably and the walls would be paneled or made of logs. I was trying to find some kind of paintings that would look good on those walls other than the Charles Russell prints. In my cabins, people would break in and steal the Russell prints so I decided to put prints in the cabin that would not be so attractive to steal. I started looking at prints of Grandma Moses paintings and realized those prints would look simply great on a paneled or log wall. So I started buying them until finally I ended up with seven. I remember well three in white frames that hung together, still do, matter of fact, in a dining room, living room and now in my bedroom. One was a Fourth of July Celebration. The original of that one hangs in the White House. Two others of that series are snow scenes and one is a Christmas scene with the gathering of Christmas trees. There are scores of people doing scores of things in each painting. Well, suffice to say those paintings look great on my paneled walls and no one ever wanted to steal a one of them.

As I said I ended up with seven of them. In addition to the three that I described there is another winter scene, a Halloween scene, a harvest scene and a summer storm scene.

All seven hang now in my bedroom among my most sacred souvenirs of a long life well spent in the pursuit of many forms of art.

The Grandma Moses prints will always be some of my most special prints as they say so much about rural life in the United States, and Vermont in particular but they hearken back to a time when it was that we all worked together more than we do today.

Anyway, it is September so Happy Birthday Grandma Moses!