Back in the 1990s, my mother and I had a small booth at one of the local craft malls that was part of the Coomer’s chain. Mom mostly did her own style of decorative painting (original black line drawings filled in with acrylic washes); I did a weird mix of needlecraft, whatever crafts I was moved to attempt (making miniature birdbaths out of tiny terra cotta flower pots and saucers, for example), and decorative painting. My painting started out following actual patterns in books and magazines; then I slowly developed a semi-primitive folk art style, adapting what I’d learned from the more formal projects.
Mom and I both painted on found objects, the more creative, the better. We scoured the flea markets and Goodwill for old graniteware cups and plates and every kind of wooden surface (old salad bowls, recipe and cheese boxes — I even did several small still lifes on wooden soap dishes, sitting them on edge so the dish became a miniature “canvas”).
The Canada goose in the photo above started out as an unpainted wooden shape I found at Goodwill. What else could it be but a Canada goose in flight? And yet, after someone took the trouble to cut out the shapes and assemble the form, the goose wound up on a jumbled shelf of junk at Goodwill. Especially good treasures turned up like that all the time.
I’d followed a pattern to paint Canada geese a couple of times and had the colors and markings pretty well established in my mind, so I “winged” painting the flying wooden form (no pun intended — oh, okay, the pun was irresistible). I forget now whether the goose ever actually made it into the Coomer’s booth. I think it did; and no one wanted it. Eventually, as sometimes happened, I removed the item from our booth inventory and gave Mom the goose. (NO, no intentional pun this time; that one’s just creepy.)
I think the goose hung on the front porch of the small house Mom and my stepdad David shared in western Hamilton County, near Harrison, Ohio. When they moved to Loveland, the goose vanished for awhile. Then Mom started putting together her cabin-style guest room, and the Canada goose became a perfect wall decoration. My painting aside, I think he has a certain grandeur and seems to take great joy in being free to take flight once again.
