Its September and I’m glad to be back in Florida. It’s starting to get cold up north and I’m just not into it. Last summer and fall were a complete blur to me. My husband’s elderly father fell ill in early July. He was in the hospital for almost a month until we could arrange for him to come live at our home on hospice care. He passed peacefully with his son beside him in December, two weeks before we were due to get him to the warm Florida sunshine. Among the things he left behind (I’ve never seen so many socks and T-shirts in my life!) was a collection of his amateur artworks. There are stacks of canvases and frames in the basement in various degrees of completion. When it was time to set up new Florida households for My Fella and I and my mother in law, of course we had to incorporate his paintings into the decorating!
Custom art framing is an incredibly expensive proposition, so we looked at the ways my father in law made his own frames. We are on a retirement budget, remember? His way of doing some of them was actually very basic- wood glue, corner clamps, a sharp pencil, tape measure, a miter box, my favorite picture hanging kit from Harbor Freight Tools (don’t forget your coupons!), and pine trim pieces.
My Fella, good at all things DIY, got me started with a 10 minute tutorial/pep talk and set me on my way to making custom frames. Math was never a strong subject for me (truthfully I never had a strong subject), so the measuring and possible waste of wood made me a little anxious. I am working a little every day and in less than two weeks, I have framed and hung two paintings.
The first one is an unfinished painting that I sent over to my mother in law’s cottage. See the chair and cushion? Those are in her guest bedroom now, so I thought it would be a great place to hang the painting. She is tickled pink with this work; at age eighty six, her memory is slipping a bit but she specifically remembers him working on this painting and asking for her opinion because he couldn’t find the right way to finish it. I have not bought any special paint or brushes like he would have, the white is just the household trim paint.
The second painting completes a set of three over my bed and the frame is the same paint as I used on my living room prohibition table refinish that I did in the spring.
When our time ends, we will all leave some project unfinished, some decisions unmade and some things left unsaid. I think Pop would be very happy to know that these are being cared for and enjoyed instead of stacked up in his crawl space. I am not the perfectionist that he was, so the wood is not baby’s-ass smooth prior to paint application. I’m finishing what he started in my own way, thus making it…well, ours.
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