The Quirky Comes from my Granny
Like many of you, I spent a good chunk of time with family for the Thanksgiving holiday. We gathered at my granny’s house (crossing over the river and through the woods, of course) this year in New Mexico.
There is a lot of quirkiness in my family, but I think a good portion of it comes directly from my granny, Lynne Loshbaugh. She is the one who taught my sister and I to burp at will by swallowing air. She’s also a painter, with an artistic style I’ve seen described as “primitive,” “folk art,” “childlike,” “whimsical,” etc. etc. Since I’ve been exposed to her art since I was very small, I’ve seen it evolve over the last 25 or 30 years.
She started painting after her three children had left the nest, and her earliest work generally shows landscapes. But in the late 70s and early 80s, her landscapes started to have strange things in them.
To commemorate my parents wedding, she painted them in front of the church, with all the family members milling about behind them. She included my mother’s horse in the parking lot – wearing roller skates.
In my bedroom when I was a small child there was a large painting she had done, a winter scene. There are snow covered hills behind a skating pond, and a grove of trees filling a valley with a few houses. Hidden in the trees or skulking on the rooftops, are half a dozen …creatures. Monsters, perhaps. I spent a lot of time as a kid looking at that painting, trying to figure out if I had found all of the monsters, or if there was another one hiding somewhere.
Later the monsters stopped hiding in the background and brightly colored creatures started to be central figures in her work. As her grandchild, this came to me mainly in the form of Christmas and birthday packages painted with googly eyed monsters. When we visited, she drove a minivan with a brightly painted plastic gorilla as a hood ornament. Her dashboard was populated with bobble heads and sequined dolls. When I was ten or so, she took my sister and I to pick out and paint our own plastic animals; the purple striped tiger I created must be in my parents’ house somewhere.
Granny Lynne introduced me to the peculiar wonders of Archie McPhee long before I moved to Seattle and found their store. For several years, she bought jars of small plastic toys from them – an assortment of inch long babies, sheriff’s badges, glasses, tiny tennis rackets and other items which she glued into paintings or used to create borders. These were joined by newspaper clippings and the occasional beer label as she became a mixed media artist.
“Fiesta de la Lluvia (Rain Party)” appeared as the cover of Nexus magazine’s May/June 2003 issue.
She also began to use colored paper to clothe the characters in paintings. It was just at the awkward time of my puberty when her women were often wearing transparent paper dresses which showed their underwear and skin underneath. It seemed terribly risque to me at the time. When 9/11 came and airport security became a circus, though, she painted Adam and Eve, covered only with their boarding passes.
During college I spent several Thanksgivings in New Mexico with the rest of my family. I had my laptop to do schoolwork, and then suddenly everyone had laptops. Granny Lynne began painting bald-headed men staring at computers, ignoring brightly colored jungles. There was a painting of a family watching their laptops while, in the background, the Thanksgiving turkey falls to the floor. This year was much the same, except now there are smartphones in the mix as well. My husband showed her a picture on his phone. “See,” he said, “It’s Salvador Dali walking an anteater.”
She squinted for a moment, then said, “Bullshit.”
I’ll be waiting to see if that one comes out in a painting, because I can often recognize the real life situations filtered through into her paintings. If the people aren’t familiar, the animals often are. The Loshbaugh side of my family is fiercely devoted to their dogs, and there have been many appearances by critters belonging to my various relatives. If I get a dog of my own it will surely turn up in a picture someday. Although she turned 81 this year, Granny Lynne is still painting, still learning new things, and still inspiring me with her whimsical world. Thinking about how her work has changed over the years, I wonder how my writing will evolve as well.
I wouldn’t call her art “primitive”–whatever it is, it’s a helluva lot of fun.
As I understand it, “primitive” or “naive” art is a recognized art style and the words don’t mean quite the same in art circles as they do in general conversation 🙂