New Abstract Art, and a Depression Christmas Story from my Mother

Thanks to those who reached out following my mid-December blog on Relapse and Recovery. I’m always grateful to know something I wrote resonated in some way. In these more personal blogs I share some of my inner life experiences. But I think the themes are universal; I am not unique.

My mother would have turned 100 this January 1. In honor of her memory, this month’s blog includes her story of Christmas 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression. It’s a story as she related it to me a number of years ago.

I finished 2023 with two new pieces, and with an earlier piece selected for display in a new exhibition in St. Petersburg.

Latest Pieces

My collage, The Memory Palace, is part of ARTWORKS OPEN, a show running January 2 – 28 at St. Pete ArtWorks Gallery, 2604 Central Ave., Downtown St. Petersburg. There is a lot of very cool art at the gallery and in this show. If you are local to St. Pete, or visiting in January, check it out!

My (Re)Discovery of Abstract Art and Geometric Art

I began making art, as an adult, while in treatment for addiction and the underlying trauma that led to addiction. I learned that many treatment centers and private therapists use art therapy as a way to uncover and heal from old psychological wounds that often come from early childhood experiences, and sometimes from traumatic adult experiences.

In art therapy classes there were themes, directed by the art therapist, that related to the ongoing therapeutic work. Sometimes the direction was to produce something representational, but my response was more often abstract. There was something beyond words or representational images seeking a way out. I found myself in the flow, not consciously thinking about what I was doing, but intuitively laying down patterns and colors.

One further evolution came when I took some of that material and began tearing and cutting it up, and rearranging the pieces into montages and collages. Another came when I started using geometric concepts, which conveyed a sense of movement and dimension. A lot of that work echoes my childhood noodling of intersecting patterns of lines.

These past four years my art has continued along these lines. I closed out the year with two strongly geometric pieces, Double Vision and It’s the Journey.

Christmas, 1934

My mother lived into her 100th year, which would have concluded January 1, 2024. I miss her every day. There have been moments when waves of sadness wash over me, but I had in many ways grieved her loss in anticipatory fashion in the years before she actually died. She had a truly remarkable life, and was a talented storyteller.

The following is a story she related to me just before Christmas 2020.

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“One Christmas we didn’t have any money. Mother and Dad had explained to us that we’d had an early freeze, and the freeze had taken Dad’s fall crop of squash, and so we would not be getting anything for Christmas.

“Papa, Mother’s father, never gave us anything, not even at Christmas. He could have given us bicycles, he could have given us dolls, he could have given us doll carriages— but Papa was, Papa didn’t do that. And of course there was never anything from Granddad and Grandmother Reeder.” (Granddad Reeder was a Baptist preacher.)

“And so we didn’t have any money. And we would not be getting anything for Christmas. And I thought that was terrible.

“But who I thought that was terrible for was not me. I thought it was terrible for Graham, who was just a tad of a boy. He was born about four and a half years after I was.

“I was born in 1924, and was in about the fourth grade and in the Gillette School by that time. Mother had quit teaching by then, the School Board had offered her only $85 a month when the Depression hit and Dad said no, you’re worth more than that to me, and he stuck with that. I think I would have been in the fourth grade. Six and four is ten, I would have been about ten.

“And so it would have been the Christmas of 1934.

“I have always tucked money away, since I was a child. And I had a quarter tucked away. And so I decided I’d take my quarter and I’d buy Hershey bars. No, not Hershey bars— well, one of those kind of bars, they all cost five cents. And back then they were nice-sized bars of candy too, Hersheys and Milky Ways, pure chocolate, for five cents.

“I included Lee Starling, the single young man Dad had hired, who slept upstairs where my older brother J.T. slept, and so when I got through, a quarter would buy five candy bars, and so it was Mother and Dad and Graham, that was three, and J.T. and Lee Starling, that made five, that was my quarter.

“So I walked down to Uncle Lamar’s Store, the Red Top, at the corner of Moccasin Wallow Road, and bought five candy bars.

“Dad had some paper that eggplants would be wrapped in before they were put in boxes, and there was some of that paper left over. And I knew where it was. It was white paper, but kind of a greyish white, and it was shiny on one side.

“So before I went to sleep that night I wrapped the candy bars in this shiny eggplant wrapping paper. I had saved some colored string from— well, I was just a saver back then, so I had something to wrap with and made some homemade tags I put on my wrapped candy bars.

“I got up early and put my little gifts everyplace at the table. When my mother saw what I had done Christmas morning— I’d never seen my mother cry— but she realized what I had done, I had taken my quarter and not spent it on myself but had bought everybody else a five-cent candy bar and then wrapped and put them at everybody’s place at the table, when mother saw what I had done she went down to her bedroom and got a few coins out of her purse, which was all she had, and she put them at my place.

“And of course everybody had a little wrapped gift but me, and everybody enjoyed their candy bar at breakfast, and of course the boys were tickled with their candy bars, and so Mother cut her candy bar and gave me a piece of her candy bar.

“I think that was the worst Christmas I had, when I realized I had made Mother feel so bad. This is the first time I have told this story. I never told your father.

“My Dad had said he would be planting a spring crop, and it would be late enough that there wouldn’t be a freeze that would get it, and he said whenever he sold yellow squash in the farmers market then we would all get something, and we did.

“And that’s a Christmas that I won’t ever forget.”

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In the new year, may you be safe; may you be healthy; may you be happy; may you live at ease in the world.

Happy New Year!