Art: Buttermilk Tree

Two years ago an artist who called herself Nura published a book for moppets in which illustrations of children with milky skins, large heads, solemn black eyes, faced blank pages. The moppets were supposed to fill in the blank pages with stories to accompany the illustrations. This week Nura published her second book. The Buttermilk Tree. This time Nura supplied the story as well as the illustrations.

Nura’s evanescent, occasionally rhymed tale traces the history of a grave, unearthly, mild-mannered girl from birth beneath a Buttermilk Tree to motherhood. More interesting to most readers will be Nura’s black and white pictures which achieve charm by combining a simple mysticism with an awareness of actuality. Animals, playthings, schoolbooks surround the solemn child as she grows up. At 15 she stares into space, a mirror on her lap. She emerges into starry light, the world at her feet, on her bridal night. “Full Bloom” shows her, arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, facing her babe who sleeps beneath another lucent Buttermilk Tree.

Nura got the idea for her story from a reminiscence of her childhood in Kansas City. So fond was her older and only sister of buttermilk that her parents used to say: “We’ll have to grow a buttermilk tree for you.” Nura patiently waited for the tree, was told when she asked that they grew only on wishing rings.

Assiduous U. S. gallery snoopers and the Paris Salon d’Autonne have known about Nura since 1925. She studied in Kansas City’s Art Institute, at the Art Students League in New York and in Chicago where she met her Painter-Husband Eduard Buk Ulreich. Buk Ulreich nicknamed her Nura because he “never calls people by their right names.” Her right name is Norah Woodson Ulreich. When she and her husband do murals together they sign them Bukannura. Living in a Manhattan studio, they have no children because Nura feels a real one might engross her to the point that she could not paint imaginary ones.