Your family’s dilemma strikes a chord. My sister and I are now in our 70s; our children have limited appetite for our father’s work. We don’t have a plan and never took care of the art for reasons that ranged from simmering resentment of him (in my case) to sheer busyness. While our mother was dying, a gallerist in eastern Canada mounted a show and absconded with the work. I should have tried harder than I did to recover it. It’s not easy to inherit the estate of an artist, even a minor one.
I hear you. Managing the art is logistically and emotionally difficult. I admired your post on your father's work and am working on another post like this one about a painting that we lost. How horrible that someone just stole your father's work, but I can easily see how it could happen.
What wonderful "finds," Victoria, but also what a cautionary tale, especially coming from a biographer herself. I look forward to hearing about the next legs of your "hunt!" You're setting up a suspenseful story for us.
I’m an artist, so this is a really poignant read for me. My parents have bought several of my paintings over the years, and my mother recently moved into a care home + my father is about to move out of their large house into a much smaller one, so what to do with my artworks has already become an issue. He didn’t want to let go of any of them, so in the end decided to hang them all in the new place. No idea what my kids will do with unsold work when I eventually go! Hope they’re sensible and just keep a few special pieces though. Paintings are so difficult to conserve for more than a few decades. I always tell young artists to make stone sculptures if they want their work to last for centuries! Thanks for sharing your experiences.
It's poignant for me to read this from you too. I know what it's like to live in homes filled with family art. Your family is lucky to have yours! Over the course of all this looking for my father's paintings I've also realized that the actual object matters less to me than the record of it (I'll have to go into that more in the next post). I think for real archivists the original is crucial but for me a reproduction is often good enough. So I wish I had better documentation of my father's career, and I wish I had started when he was alive. But I also enjoy the serendipity of this discovery process-- to be continued.
That painful process of clearing the house, sorting a lifetime of work and stuff and .... This description is so razor sharp. And then this... "My sisters and I made choices and moved on, which is exactly what is so difficult about loss in general—the balancing act between holding on and letting go."
Your family’s dilemma strikes a chord. My sister and I are now in our 70s; our children have limited appetite for our father’s work. We don’t have a plan and never took care of the art for reasons that ranged from simmering resentment of him (in my case) to sheer busyness. While our mother was dying, a gallerist in eastern Canada mounted a show and absconded with the work. I should have tried harder than I did to recover it. It’s not easy to inherit the estate of an artist, even a minor one.
I hear you. Managing the art is logistically and emotionally difficult. I admired your post on your father's work and am working on another post like this one about a painting that we lost. How horrible that someone just stole your father's work, but I can easily see how it could happen.
To be continued...
What wonderful "finds," Victoria, but also what a cautionary tale, especially coming from a biographer herself. I look forward to hearing about the next legs of your "hunt!" You're setting up a suspenseful story for us.
Thanks, Marnie!
I’m an artist, so this is a really poignant read for me. My parents have bought several of my paintings over the years, and my mother recently moved into a care home + my father is about to move out of their large house into a much smaller one, so what to do with my artworks has already become an issue. He didn’t want to let go of any of them, so in the end decided to hang them all in the new place. No idea what my kids will do with unsold work when I eventually go! Hope they’re sensible and just keep a few special pieces though. Paintings are so difficult to conserve for more than a few decades. I always tell young artists to make stone sculptures if they want their work to last for centuries! Thanks for sharing your experiences.
It's poignant for me to read this from you too. I know what it's like to live in homes filled with family art. Your family is lucky to have yours! Over the course of all this looking for my father's paintings I've also realized that the actual object matters less to me than the record of it (I'll have to go into that more in the next post). I think for real archivists the original is crucial but for me a reproduction is often good enough. So I wish I had better documentation of my father's career, and I wish I had started when he was alive. But I also enjoy the serendipity of this discovery process-- to be continued.
Thanks for reminding me of this, Victoria! - I'm now gonna create some sort of archive to simplify everything for my kids' in the future.
That painful process of clearing the house, sorting a lifetime of work and stuff and .... This description is so razor sharp. And then this... "My sisters and I made choices and moved on, which is exactly what is so difficult about loss in general—the balancing act between holding on and letting go."