My New 50% of Meaning, ...37 Years Later, to My Drawing "Naptime"

                                                                              “Naptime” – charcoal, chalk, on toned paper, 197 ( photo, 2013 )

Assignment for Drawing class, 1973:  Make a still life drawing, using charcoal and chalk on toned paper, demonstrating a variety of tonal values, perspective, and texture in your design.  ~  Ted Krone

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What to draw?  What will hold still in the house while baby is sleeping:   an old chair, her bonnet, shoes and toy stuffed hen.

Why did I choose this arrangement for my focus?

And why did I, later, frame it, and even later, hang it in the heart of my (empty-nest) house, the kitchen,…toward the back door…and why do I photograph it now, so near the clock?

At the time, I liked the simple shapes, the folds, the shadows, the geometric and organic mix --- an easy draw --- quotidienne --- no message inherent, or intended?  That’s perhaps ‘why?’ then.  But why now?  Why do I cherish it? 

The ‘literature (retired) teacher’ in me sees, now – 30+ years later – the visual metaphor of a happy childhood, my mother’s, mine, my children’s, someday their children’s: 

~~the plain, strong, sturdy chair as framework and support --- yet with not quite vertical or horizontal lines, and the chair positioned slightly askew, as if willing to bend and accommodate; the corners slightly rubbed rounder with age and use of many seasons, the lumpy cushion on the hard wooden seat --- we old ones – strong, but not severe, and more than a little silly.

~~the silent, plump and calico-tufted toy hen --- facing away at the corner of the seat, round eyes daring the shadows, the intrusion of anything other than its own, soft, squatty silence, ---guarding.

~~then the little shoes, tumbled over and tipped sideways, anything but flatly placed…the freedom of the loopy laces, the yawning of the space within, the ease...the brightness of white leather and loose cotton ties…the clean, merry untidiness.

~~and the gauzy bonnet, bright as the sunshine it lately kept from the (here unseen) gauzy head of the cherished child, apparently napping elsewhere, in the house that holds its breath and goes on tiptoe.

~~The photo-halted clock, the glass, the frame…that moment I must capture, to share with the sleeping child, decades later, when she is ‘mother,’ too.