Art

Every year for Mother’s Day Colby gave me something he created. It might have been a drawing, something he made from wood (such as a garden stool), or a poem. A few years ago Colby gave me the painting you see at the top of this post. In keeping with his belief about using everything and throwing nothing away that had any possible use, this painting is done on a piece of cardboard. For this painting he also used paint that was left over from other projects.

The reason I like this painting so much is not just because I think it is beautiful, it’s because the gold in the mountains is paint that was left over from the time we went to Bowie Park in Fairview and gathered pine cones that we tipped with gold and gave to friends as Christmas gifts. The red is from when Colby made a CD storage bin out of popsicle sticks for my mother and painted it. The cardboard is from boxes of books I had delivered for a book signing that Colby helped me stack, and the darker background is paint that was left over from the time Colby and I painted my toy box from when I was a child. The toy box was more recently his, and now resides in the spare bedroom as a bookshelf. Before it was my toy box, it was a storage chest during WWII when my mother was in the Marines.

This is just one of many paintings that Colby did. Most are abstracts and reflect the way he was feeling at the time he painted them. All make excellent use of color and design. Today as I clean out more “stuff” from his room I find his stacks of bare canvasses, his pains and his brushes. In addition to the traditional canvasses most artists use I find several blocks of wood, a small piece of corrugated metal, and two old skateboards—minus wheels. His brushes consist of a small assortment of the usual, plus a number of sponges, table knives, a toothbrush, and a few small scrub brushes. I am so deeply and heart-breakingly saddened that I will never see what work of art Colby planned to create with his collection of “stuff.” I know it would have been absolutely awesome.