10 Mar The Power of Art

The Power of Art

By Anna M. A. Stracey

What can you really know about the grandparents you never met? Second-hand stories and anecdotes? Vague descriptions and family photos? These provide a form, a basic shape, but not the warm embodiment of that person. How do you touch someone who died 50 years before your birth? Art—like a trace of a memory or an aura of energy left behind by its creator—provides that bridge from past to present.

Grandfather was an artist. He was a bookbinder in the times of gold leaf and vellum, and an artist who drew print advertisements for newspapers and painted hunting dogs and show horses on commission. He died in 1927 when my father was hardly more than a toddler. I know my grandfather through a handful of stories my father and aunts shared with me, but I truly know my grandfather through his art— the lasting imprint on time and space of an otherwise mostly forgotten working-class immigrant. Two relics survive a set of hand-bound music books made for my grandmother’s piano music, and one of his paintings— a watercolor and pencil sketch of two handsome foxhounds (a study done for one of his last paintings) that for decades hung on my aunt’s living room wall and now hangs in my office. The soft lines and ease of drawing. Sketches of 100-year-old dogs on faded and still fading newsprint.

Likewise, the music books are in my possession. I see Grandfather’s steady hand and care for detail in the gold embossing, Grandmother’s initials stamped on the front and the word MUSIC on the spine of the once vibrant blue linen cover.

I know more about my grandmother—an orphaned child and a widowed mother, a secretary for the railway who made difficult decisions to keep her family afloat—but inside these books is a journey into Grandmother’s talent as a pianist—pages of popular music from the 1910s and 20s, fast-paced and complex arrangements. Looking at the music, reading the lyrics and working out the tunes in my head, like a bolt of sound and emotion, I can feel her as she sang with her friends and family, young and joyful, playing these melodies with a special ease from books that were bound together by someone who loved her.

I have photos of them, I know their likenesses—Grandfather leaning in a doorway with my father at his feet and Grandmother smiling at his side, but somehow, I know more of who she was from her well-used sheet music full of memories. I know more of who he was from these foxhounds and these lovingly bound books.

Being the “baby of the family,” I suspect I will be the last person to remember Grandfather and Grandmother, but maybe, for as long as these objects remain, I may not be the last one to know them in this intimate way.