-
Miss Viola Snodgrass, suffragette and schoolmarm, portrait #7
Today’s model was Miss Viola Snodgrass. She arrived at my house on her shining clean bicycle, wearing a long ample skirt and a white blouse with fabric-covered buttons. Once I had her seated, she did not move a muscle, but while we were talking she commented that this was foolishness, I could have used a…
-
Maddalena’s admonishment
There are always social changes with each new generation. These differences can be great when generations span continents as well. As the grandchild of two sets of Italian grandparents, sometimes this became very apparent to me. Despite their greatest efforts to become Americans they still retained some of their old world ideas, particularly my grandmother…
-
On painting Abraham Lincoln
I try to draw or paint every single day, it’s a discipline that I think helps me as an artist. I didn’t have a commission to paint Saturday so I went through the Shorpy archive of old photographs and found one of Abraham Lincoln. It was taken the year that he died. Perfect, I thought,…
-
Pasquale Riccio and Angelina Grillo
1989 was the year I fulfilled my dream to travel to Italy to visit my relatives. I had been writing to a cousin named Teresa Riccio for several years and my destination was her house in Sersale, Catanzaro, Calabria. Her parents, Pasquale Riccio (Riccio means hedgehog) and Angelina Grillo (Grillo means cricket) put us up…
-
Le Castagne – Chestnuts
In Calabria, once upon a time before there were tomatoes (there was a time like this!) and before there was inexpensive pasta, people subsisted on Chestnuts – there was little else so readily available to stave off starvation in the wintertime. They boiled them with other vegetables, they dried them and ground them up for…