A Colorful Lady

A couple of months ago, on my last visit to Berkeley, I dropped in at the Red Bird, my favorite clothing boutique, and admired a painting there. The Danish artist, Gert Mathiesson had recently died very suddenly of a brain aneurysm, and his wife, Pam Smilow, also an artist, was continuing to sell their work. I published a picture of his cheerful painting on Feb. 4th.

A few weeks later, I got an email from Pam offering to come to our house with a selection of their paintings for us to look at. She came today with a big batch of rolled canvasses, including the birds in a tree which I had admired, and a portfolio full of works on paper. We spent a wonderful couple of hours getting to know this vibrant New Yorker. She has a wonderful eye for scale (and is clearly a colorful lady herself) and knew immediately exactly which spaces in our house would come to life with the right picture on the wall.

We all took turns holding up pictures, choosing colors and discussing which elements we liked best. She knew we had a particular space we wanted to fill, and knew exactly what space it was as soon as she walked in the door and looked around. What we liked about both artists' work was the whimsey and the wonderful colors. I chose this picture of Pam because it I think it illustrates both.

In the end, we chose the original Gert Matthiesson birds in a tree. There is even a story to go with it. On the eve of hurricane Sandy, Pam and Gert had a visitor whose flight home from New York was cancelled, so Gert drove him home--which was nine hours away! He stayed one jump ahead of the hurricane the whole way, and even managed to stop to take a picture of a tree full of birds, which he used as inspiration for his painting.

In other news: they installed the pebbles, again, in our shower today, and took away the crate containing the sad remains of the first attempt, The driver seemed reluctant to drive his enormous truck up our steep driveway, so he parked it at the bottom and drove our little pile of pebbles on on a forklift….