Summer Memories
Nope, I do not have a memory of wandering through a field of daisies in summertime, with a brother and sister in hand. However, as we all suffer through a scorching heat wave, this artwork speaks to me of childhood summer memories. My childhood was in the 1960s, a time of great extremes, though not of the global warming type. As a child I was unaware of much of the political storms in our society, but I did manage to stir up quite a bit all on my own.
The artwork, picked up at my favorite thrift store, set me back $6.00. It is titled “Daisies for Mom” and is signed Miriam Ecker. It is a numbered etching, and is charmingly done in sepia color with two fabulous accent colors . Miriam Ecker (1926-2005) was a New York City artist, and achieved some success for her work, having one piece juried into a Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Artists show in 1966.
If you look closely at the artwork, you can see the tell-tale signs that it is a hand pulled, hand water colored etching. Just passed the brown edge, there is a deep groove, a result of the heavy press literally pressing the paper as it is pulled through the printing press. In addition, looking at the piece with magnification, you can see the ink dots are not uniform as they would be with a mechanically printed lithograph (Benday dots, see prior blog post for explanation: https://www.ericasheirloomquilts.com/ericas-heirloom-treasures/stop-the-press-its-a-print). And Ecker decided, when the piece was created, that the children’s two buckets should be enhanced – using watercolor she painted them yellow and orange. I have found a few more examples of this work online, and those do not have the added color. In my mind, the two splashes of color are the best part of this piece, drawing your eye to the children, and the flowers splashing from their charming buckets.
For those of you paying attention to perspective now (https://www.ericasheirloomquilts.com/ericas-heirloom-treasures/wonky-perspective), notice how successfully Ecker created the depth of the field. The daisies in the foreground are the largest, blending into simple smudges of shape the further back they go. The trees at the horizon are proportionally correct in relation to the size of the children, and the two birds anchor the idea of the trees being “in the distance”. And then there is the classic triangle shape – in this case the oldest child in the middle, linking arms with the two younger ones, creating a triangle front and center. This is mimicked by the shape of the trees in the distance, giving your eye a pleasing way to wander around the work.
The color choice, of sepia ink, is an interesting one, and I learned a bit about this color in my meandering on the internet. It seems sepia ink has been used for artwork all the way back to the ancient Greeks. It was originally derived from the ink sac of the common cuttlefish, called a ‘sepia’ in Greek. With the advent of photography, the color “sepia” became synonymous with old-time photographs, and we all have filters on our phones that allow any photograph to be changed to “sepia”. What I had not known was that into the 1940s, African American music was referred to as “sepia music” (or even worse, “race music”), until the expression “R&B” replaced it.
Why, I hear a few of you grumbling, does this artwork bring back childhood memories? There is a photograph of me as a young girl that I immediately thought of when seeing this piece. There are three of us, my next oldest sister, 5 years older than me, and my closest in age brother, 18 months older. We stand in a triangular shape, and I’m likely a around 18 months old. I am wearing a bathing suit near identical to the one in “Daisies for Mom”, and I am up to no good as usual…
