I flew down to L.A. for the day to visit my 82 year old mom. This is one of my her paintings from the 50s. It's a picture of her Bubbie (grandmother) that we found in an old free-standing wooden closet in her garage.
That old wooden closet was from the funky old beach house one block from the ocean in Santa Monica where she was born and grew up. That house was stolen from my grandparents by the city to make room for huge beach-front skyscraper condos back in the early 60s–eminent domain they called it. The city razed several square blocks around my feisty grandmother, who refused to leave. But eventually my grandparents were forced out and lost the family home, which would now be worth millions.
I remember that old wooden closet in Bubbie's house, standing in the back room known as the "service porch" with it's splintery, roughhewn, dark wood walls, a laundry tub, the old icebox, and one lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling with a chain hanging down. The closet sported a decal of a foxy red wolf face that says "She Wolf" under it that my mother had applied as a teenager. That wolf always scared me when I was little.
Now the closet holds the paintings that she'd made in the 1950s which were slowly being damaged by the elements. We hauled them out and I took photos of them. If you'd like to see more of these very interesting paintings, I made a page for them on my website that you can SEE by CLICKING HERE.
I made the oil painting below of MY Bubbie (her mother) when I was the same age as my mom when she made hers, and I guess our Bubbies were about the same age too. (Click to see it larger.)
Jana Bouc, Artist 