Skip to main content

Baba Farming

14" x 17", ink and wash on bristol board, 2005, private collection

This is a painting of my father's mother (who we affectionately called Baba Lenka)  based on a photo taken about ten years ago. She died six years ago this month and was my and my sister's last remaining grandparent. I don't remember the first time I met her when I was a baby, but our family visited Macedonia in 1978 and I do remember that trip fondly.

Here she is gathering potatoes on the family farm in the village of Nošpal in Macedonia. She died a very old woman and, although she may have had a crooked back, her handwriting in the letters she wrote to us --even into her advanced years-- was always straight as an arrow.

I also did a painting on her on the steps of her home with her famous peppers.

She's also been on my mind recently since my wife Krista and I have just bought a farm of our own and we're slowly making it into the home of our dreams. And interesting circle is completing itself: my parents grew up on separate poor village farms, came to Toronto and gave me and my sister (who's named after our baba) everything...and now I've left the city to go back to my own farm. And I couldn't be happier.

Zdravo, Baba!

In 2017 I did a colour version of this in oils for my Phase Two contribution to my collaborative painting project with Celia Sage.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi...

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co...

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise  (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me ...