Art: Grandma’s Imaginings

In her steel-rimmed glasses and beaded chiffon dress, the little old lady looked like a tintype grandmother. Her birdlike, smiling face was framed in a white lace collar and black ribbon choker; on her feet were pointed little one-button shoes. But there were surprising touches too: as a guard for her wedding ring she wore a blue celluloid chicken band, and one ear had a bright green dab of paint.

Grandma Moses was getting ready for her 88th birthday and for her tenth anniversary as a professional artist. In those ten years she had painted some 1,300 pictures, which now sell for as much as $3,000 apiece. “Let’s see,” she said last week, “I can start a batch of five on a Monday and have them finished off on a Saturday. It’s according to how I feel, and my callers.”

Kittens & Kangaroos. The callers who flock to Grandma Moses’ upper New York State farm at Eagle Bridge (there were 500 of them last summer) might seem a chore to someone else, but Grandma loves having them. She also enjoys showing off the snapshots they sometimes leave with her. “Now this,” she will remark, “was a very nice family from Ohio . . . This poor girl lost her kitty just before she came .. . This was a woman all the way from Australia. She brought me a kangaroo skin and a hula skirt!”

Grandma Moses has other distractions: eleven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. “When I had my children and grandchildren,” she remembers, “I was about as busy as they were. I never had much good of them. I have more time now for my great-grandchildren.” But with it all she keeps sending her pictures to Manhattan galleries: “If they wait long enough I get up a big batch of 20 or so, but they’re apt to phone before then and ask what I’ve got done.”

When her doctor ordered her to rest from farm work because of her neuritis and arthritis, Grandma turned to painting, “to keep busy and out of mischief.” A Manhattan art collector saw her work on display in a local drugstore, and the next year she had her first and fabulously successful New York show.

In a happier age, the simple gaiety of Grandma’s art might have seemed less extraordinary and therefore less valuable.

She most admires Currier & Ives prints, which often reflect the same sentiments and the same details of rural life that her pictures do, in their less studied way.

“We See It Pink.” She sometimes has artistic disputes with the dealers, who have their own ideas of what a painting by the country’s best-known “primitive” should look like. When Grandma paints a picture that seems not quite in character, her dealers sadly send it back. One such reject hanging over her mantel shows a sunset above a Western canyon, with a log cabin in the foreground. “What one likes,” says Grandma philosophically, “another don’t.” Another of her favorite rejects is a storm scene, with black clouds lowering in a pink sky. “Dr. Kallir [one of her dealers] wants me to change it. He don’t like pink. He just hasn’t seen the sky like that, but up here we see it pink.”

Except for a family party in the evening, Grandma’s birthday next week will probably be like other days. “I got in the habit now of waking up at 6 o’clock,” she says. “I hear my son up, splittin’ the kindlin’ wood downstairs. I wait till I’m sure he’s got the coffee made, then I come down about 7. I just eat a piece of bread for breakfast, then I carry some coffee upstairs, and paint. In the afternoon I take a nap so when evenings come and the young folks come in I can set up till midnight and listen. I love to hear the gossip!”

Grandma’s studio is her bedroom. It has a wood stove for winter weather. “I look out the window sometimes,” she says, “to see the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.” She never paints from nature “because it’s easier not to.”

How to Save Paint. She lays her pictures flat on the table so she can rest her elbows while she is working. Old coffee cans hold her brushes, and on the floor at her feet is a gallon can of flat white paint for sizing the sawed pieces of masonite she paints on. Grandma does her pictures in batches, like cookies, simply to save paint. “I’ll use this blue for the sky in all of them, and then I’ll take this green for all the trees. That way your paints don’t dry up on you.”

She used to do a big mail-order business in pictures, painting just what the customers asked for, but now that her prices have skyrocketed she gets fewer orders. Her early work was framed in old mirror and picture frames that friends found for her in their attics. “But now they take them without frames. I don’t like that. It’s like sending my children out with ragged dresses on ’em. I like to see ’em dressed before they go.”

Her son Hugh and daughter-in-law Dorothy are bold enough to criticize Grandma’s work. Hugh wanted her to leave a recent landscape empty of figures, and she promised she would, “But the next thing I knew ’twas full of people. I had to fill it up. I guess I wanted company, some commotion.” Her daughter-in-law says Grandma’s interest in painting is what keeps her young. Grandma disagrees. “I don’t know as it done any more good than if I went down and cleaned the cellar.”