Watercolor, 2007
The painting of my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Whittlesey Gerrish, began as a color study. Working from a black and white photo of her, I liked the way that her blouse mimicked fields and crop rows, and so I went with green to heighten that allusion. I wanted a swirling sky behind her but the moment I added the first swirl, I realized it would look like a rip-off of Vincent van Gogh’s many skies. Had I the painting to do over, I would have worked out some other way to make a billowing sky, but there are worse painters to mimick than van Gogh.
Word, Image and Sound 