Mom's Refrigerator Door

Our refrigerator door is covered with magnets now. I usually pick up one or two whenever we travel (which means that my refrigerator door is now full of magnets. Many of the lower ones have become teething toys for dogs, so I try to make sure that the special ones are kept toward the top, out of dog range.

I love the latest one I got in Washington.

I actually had purchased a couple of postcards at the Newseum to send through the Postcrossing project. It became an instant favorite and I even had an e-mail from a guy in China asking if I could send him one of the postcards (fortunately I had bought 3 of them). I was thrilled when I found the postcard on a magnet because I loved the idea. I wonder if they ever designed a postcard like this before we had an African-American president...

As much as I enjoy the magnets, I think I prefer the days when the refrigerator was a place to display the kids' latest art work. We have a side-by-side now and I don't know if school artwork would fit, but back then we had a regular refrigerator with a freezer compartment above and so there was lots of uninterrupted blank space to display artwork.

For years there was a rotating display of art from each of the kids. When they got too old to have work to display, Jeri went off to college to study theatre design. When she completed her masters degree at UCD she brought home a rolled up piece of canvas on which was painted part of a backdrop for a show she had designed. She told me I didn't have to post it on the refrigerator door (good thing, since I would have had to wrap the refrigerator in it, it was so big!)

But now it appears we are entering a new era. Walt recently spent several days in Santa Barbara visiting his mother, while his sister and her husband are taking a short vacation. He had meals at Tom and Laurel's several times and he brought home this finger painting by Bri for me.

I'm not sure where I'm going to put it, since it's too wide for the refrigerator door, but I'm glad that I can scan it and post it here (even if it's too wide for my scanner to capture all of it.

I think it displays a remarkable artistic sense. First, paint takes over its shallow space. It gets denser, the painting's symmetry gets more obvious, and the technique gets varied and absorbing.

(OK...that was from a review of a Jackson Pollock painting, but just look at Bri's. It applies, right?)

I can hardly wait to start removing some of my magnets and replacing them with Bri-designed art work.

The Artist as a young girl