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My roses let me down this year.  As spring unfolded I had a dozen ideas of how to use my white iceberg roses in a still life, but I needed a lot of them.  Thanks to our usual San Diego weather pattern of May Gray followed by June Gloom, most of the roses in my yard were small and wilted with the stems and leaves suffering from mildew.  Bummer!

 With the deadline looming for an art show I really wanted to enter, I had to come up with another idea fast.  No time to wait for better weather and a new round of blooms.  But to paint a still life, you really need to find something that inspires, so I got to thinking.  I remembered that I had used some old books previously in still life setups and I had really enjoyed painting them.

I started rummaging through my bookshelves for old books, thinking that they might make an interesting subject.  I found a few, but then remembered that I had a box full of old books that had belonged to my late mother.

Interestingly, I don’t remember ever seeing my mother read a book during my childhood.  As a single mom working overtime to support two kids on a grocery clerk’s wages, she just never had any time to read.  But somehow, one of the few things she saved from her childhood was this motley collection of books. 

There were story books - Swiss Family Robinson, Gene Autry and the Thief River Outlaws and others - some bearing her name written in fountain pen with a childish scrawl.  There was a child’s piano songbook (I didn’t even know she played piano!)  Some the books appeared to be schoolbooks.  One of them was a history book that was older than my mother was and I suspect had been given to her by her uncle.  It bore the faded stamped label of City Schools in Fairbury, Nebraska, as well as a faint penciled listing of names and dates just inside the cover.  It appeared to be a list of the students who had checked the book out of the school library from 1905 to 1908 – wow!  Folded up inside that book was a small, very old American flag bearing 48 stars.  I wish I had asked her the story behind that.

My mother was not a sentimental saver.  She loved a clean house and did not appreciate clutter.  Any unnecessary "stuff" had to go (I was livid when I discovered she had given away my Barbie dolls!)  How special these books must have been to her, that she had saved them her entire life! 

The more I pored over these old books the more I became aware of just how exquisitely beautiful they were. The yellowed pages, the weathered spines, the faded titles on the covers spoke of years and years of use.  What stories they could tell. 

As a still life artist I paint what I love, what I see as beautiful.  Most of the time that translates into living things – usually flowers or fruit of some kind.  It’s always exciting to discover the beauty in something mundane and ordinary that is right under our noses.  What a joy to realize that I had this box of amazing books that were so captivating, not just because of their weathered appearance, but because of the history they held and what they had meant to someone I love.  

These treasured heirlooms are the subject of my latest still life “Well Read.”  They will no doubt find their way into many more of my paintings in the future.  Mom would be pleased.