"You've GOT to see the painting!" my grandmother exclaimed after she raced out the kitchen door and down the terrace steps to greet us, when we arrived.
Gladys Perkins Chandler was beautiful, generous (quite unselfconscious!), temperamental, and she played the piano with a deep intelligence. She studied music at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and was invited by Mrs. Jack Gardner (as Isabella was known in 1917) to perform in the tapestry room at Gardner Court on the Fenway. The music performed in the Tapestry Room could be heard throughout the museum!
Gladys later threw away all her sheet music after teaching and family and no time to practice --she could no longer stand to hear herself play! --and she taught herself to paint.
Notes: Upside down and inside out in Notebook over time, including "Are you a Traditionalist?" . . . .
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Never took an art lesson. Like a musician, she learned from 'masters' --the approaches, some paintings rich in texture, accordingly. Her pallet and easel were fascinating to me when my brother Ned and I stayed with our mother's parents while our young brother James was being born. I was 4 1/2. She said, "Alright, sit down - you can do the first painting I did." Imagine! using the colors one sees in the world! Sienna, ochre, alizarin, cobalt, ultramarine ----not just the school primaries and black and white . . . . . And, "You have to MAKE black", she said . . . . "See the sky in the water . . . . use a large brush and sweep upwards into the sky and follow the current of the water flowing below . . . How does grass grow?"
- (Passacaglia by Handle)
'Bay' - Her first painting, an interpretation of Claude Monet's, 'Le bassin d'Argenteuil' v. 1872, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Her impression of J. B. Camille Corot's 'The Church in Marissel'
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From John Whorf's 'Winter by the Sea'
And she worked outside . . . .
I wrote a letter to her when she was dying promising her I would never stop painting.
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