Grasping Things by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Sunday Company,” 1973 (16” x 20”)

Anna is well aware of material symbols of Mennonite identity and she applies them to her paintings. She points out buggies, windmills, plain clothing, white houses, and green window blinds. Looking at a harvest scene with tractors, I asked her “What’s Mennonite about this painting?” “They’re steel tractors,” she replied. “They have steel tires. If they have rubber tires they can go like a truck on the road. The steel keeps it home.” The stress on home allows Anna to feel part of the productive community, despite her handicap. Paintings such as “Anxious for the Mail,” “Fall Picnic,” and “Sunday Company” reflect the joy that Anna derives from observing everyday life which flows, and her depictions compensate for her inability to participate fully or fluidly in those activities.

Like many artists, Anna manipulates forms to control error and to provide repeated, procedural standards. In various versions of “The Sugar Camp,” for example, the essential form—the sugar house—is surrounded by other objects such as a horse pulling a sled packed with barrels, a Mennonite couple standing in front of the structure, prominent trees, buckets hanging from trees, dogs observing the scene, and a woodpile lying on the snow. Anna can alter those paintings she considers “flops” to sugar camp scenes by inserting a large sugaring house in the center of the canvas and adding other items, depending on the size of the canvas. Her use of repetition to control error and to reduce anxiety from creativity is also visible in three paintings she had in progress in February 1980. Each canvas depicted a Mennonite house flanked on one side by a prominent tree and on the other by a barn. One painting had a house with three windows over two, two rooms deep with a central door, while the others had a typical I-house shape—one room deep, two rooms wide, two windows over two, and a central door. One house had a porch while the others did not. As the three paintings lay on her easels, she pointed out how she could add Mennonite symbols—green window shades, buggies, or sometimes green roofs—and provide a repeatable formula, in short, a controlled, sequential process for making things.

Several other patterns underscore Anna’s artistic control. Her roads usually run perpendicular to each other, and she uses the same pattern for fence and building formations. Houses consistently have two stories and a central chimney. For smaller canvases which often feature covered bridges or buggies, she places the basic unit in the center of the canvas and balances it with smaller units on either side. She used a similar pattern in her only still life, “The Parlor Lamp,” where a lamp is in the center of the painting and a hat and gloves are on either side. The result provides an inner triangular frame for the painting’s elements. The product is predictable in form, manipulable in symbolism.

Although “separated from the world,” Anna functions in a market economy. She keeps careful records of all her transactions.

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