The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. But there are other instruments powerful enough to forge a kind of immortality for their creator. In the case of my dear Aunt Florence, it was the beautiful canvases she painted with the stroke of a brush. Although she passed away recently after a long and beautiful life, she left behind all those incredible canvases—many of which found welcome homes over the years among her clientele, and dozens of which, courtesy of her heirs, are now gaining permanent status with family members and friends across the U.S. Something to remember her by, as if any of us could forget.
When I looked at the online gallery of her work this morning, I was taken by how much those paintings said about this remarkable woman, who was loving and kind and beautiful and smart and funny and wise and gutsy. Each of the paintings creates a unique world of its own, distinctive in style, and vastly different from the rest of the collection. That was my dear aunt, too—broadly dimensional in her outlook, and ever changing and evolving as a woman. So, it is no wonder her mind taught her brush to paint a vase of colorful flowers one day, a cubist landscape the next, and a darkly colored representational canvas sometime after that.
No one has written this beloved woman’s memoirs, although the story of her life would make for entertaining and inspiring reading, even for those who never knew her; and certainly a cherished, lasting record for those of us whose lives were touched by her.
Ultimately, my dear aunt did record her memoirs in the only way that made sense to her—in those colorful canvas images. And like Aunt Florence, they will enjoy their own brand of immortality.
