The Girl with the Olive Complexion

Once upon a lifetime there was a little girl with a olive complexion, eyes like her Grandmother Rhoda...dark brown, pigtails, scrawny legs and arms and rag-a-muffin dresses made of tiny prints and eyelet trim. 

Who lived in a remodeled OLD Swedish Church with STEEP stairs, smack dab in the middle of a farm.

This little girl didn't have other little girls to play with, rather there were only boys who liked to climb haystacks, jump from sloping metal roofs into piles of hay, and splash through irrigation ditches.

She went along with WHATEVER....

But alone in her bedroom she lived in another world....no BOYS, no ANIMALS, no HAY STACKS,

no ICY COLD IRRIGATION WATER.

Alone....not for long...as there was her constant IMAGINATION to entertain her.

Crayola Crayons for Katy Keene paper dolls with daring bosoms, (they were dressed cowgirl style),

old Victorian storybooks her Aunt L. gave to her...full of amazing black and white illustrations

a deep dark closet to hide out in

and pasture grass to lay flat on her back, dream on the clouds and whistle away dandelion tufts.

Pretty good childhood.

But one day, the girl with the olive complexion had somehow managed to get a package of CLOVE chewing gum. AH, the aroma, the spicy chew...yum.  She fell asleep daydreaming, no less. 

She awoke to her undone pigtails glued together with tasteless dull gray sticky GUM.

Into the deep tub.

Out with the soap, the oil, nothing budged that gum.

Scissors

Chop chop chop

no more pigtails.

The little girl with the olive complexion grew up to have children of her own, a husband, grandchildren, a home, a lovely life

and there was more.

She loved to draw, paint and make things.

And out of her past tumbled images of playing in a big bathtub, her hair grown back and siblings to play with.

Smiles: Sharon

Butterfly Kisses

Let’s face it, children are amazing artists. They don’t deliberate over their swishing of color over expanses of white paper. They paint “in real time.” Brushes, fingers, sponges and toes…there is no “perfect-have-to-own-it” painting implement. Subject matter simply arises from the creative well which hasn’t been diluted or tampered with. Fear, oh me oh my, why painting is pure joy, what is there to be fearful of. All that it takes for creative flow to move is opportunity, abundant supplies of paper and squishy brilliant paint. They say children’s art is “naïve” painting at its undiluted best. Naïve painting is simply painting from the soul where creativity bubbles in effervescent eruptions. There is no plan, no agenda, just pure expression.

I paint for children. The whimsical name, Lah de Dah Designs is meant to reflect the carefree nature of painting with children in mind. How does it stack up against the real thing? It doesn’t of course. My “mother-mind” has long ago evaporated from the inner, unfettered world of carefree color and imagination.

But I try. Why paint for children? Why not? It is pure fun to sit with a brush load of color and decide how to best put it on canvas hoping it adds to a child’s own imaginative pleasure. For me, art painted expressively for children is a form of storytelling, a painted narrative, a story without words. My goal: set enough of a stage and let a child tumble in.

Painting for children has become a very large, highly targeted and profitable market. I have had my opportunity with licensing art for children. I have painted countless murals, furniture and canvases for those who have the luxury of purchasing art for their child’s room. It has all been fine, a wonderful experience. But the pleasure really comes in the delight of painting without so many rules and expectations….painting from a child-like point of view.

Butterflies flirt and flit, skitter about taking a bit of dew and pollen here and there, no grand plan, no major ambition, just freedom, color, creation and touches of Butterfly Kisses along the way.

Drop by www.sharonfurner.com to see this fall's newest paintings for children and those with child-like hearts.

Happy Birthday, Grandma Mimi Johnson Sorensen

Althea Marie Johnson Sorensen was born on June 23, 1920. At a very young age she became simply known as Mimi. She was the first daughter born to Leota and Orson Alma Johnson. They lived in the Liberty Park area, which featured neat and tidy red brick homes, until she was age two; then her family moved outside of the city (today’s Draper area) to a small farm. Her young years were idyllic, as she loved to be outside running in the orchards and riding her beloved Shetland ponies. One year she rode her pony in the July 24th parade, dressed as an Indian. She won first prize! As much as she loved being outdoors, she liked even more, playing school. She was always the teacher rounding up any willing child to be her student. This foreshadowed her professional career as a teacher, first in Murray, Utah then later in the Holladay area. Grandma Mimi had a lifelong love of education and reading.

Mimi met Dale in high school, where they became sweethearts, marrying one week after graduation from the University of Utah. This was a dark time in modern history, it was the middle of World War II, and Dale was an enlisted army officer, part of the last horse drawn Calvary unit. When Dale went to Europe as a soldier, Mimi and Sharon returned to SLC to live with Dale’s parents on the farm.

Looking back at Mimi’s life, one quality that stands out in my mind was her “moxey” as my dad would put it; in other words, her feistiness, headstrong and strong-willed personality. Not much daunted her.

When I was rather young we lived on a farm, raising feed crops, chickens, cattle, sheep, etc. Life on a working farm was hard labor. Mom supervised the wholesale egg business, which consisted of washing and packing the hundreds of eggs that were gathered. This was messy work, but not nearly as messy as watching her kill a chicken, dip the entire chicken into boiling water, pluck the smelly feathers and “gut it.” This left me in awe. She needed all the “moxey” she could muster when packs of snakes would slither up to the house from the irrigation ditch, sometimes getting inside our home and she would go after them with a hoe, mincing them up.

Years later, hit by a runaway car two weeks before our wedding, mom needed all of the courage and pluck she could muster, to will herself to live, endure years of surgery, body-casts, rehabilitation and pain. That accident altered her life. She never held the teen that was responsible for this accident accountable. She practiced forgiveness, a lesson strongly etched in my mind.

Mimi was always very sophisticated, stylishly dressed and socially savvy. She was most comfortable in the world of men, feeling very much their equal.

A few things that I remember mom doing was reading Cubby In Wonderland and Brighty of the Grand Canyon to Suzanne and me. She also spent considerable time helping me with my hair. She and dad always wanted us to be dressed nicely and have very polite manners. We were taught young, what you might call etiquette. We would be taken to nice restaurants to practice our eating manners!

Today Grandma Mimi often states how proud she is of her two daughters, their husbands and the grand-children. We say that we are proud of you as you live these marginal years of old age….may this birthday bring peace to you on this earth. We love you. We know you are eager to live with the love of your life, Dale. We all sing a happy birth-day to you.