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My Great Grandmother — Transition Sector pg31
a colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
“My odd Gaelic name comes from our (soon-to-be) mother’s side,” I explained to Blair as we floated the magic carpet back down to the main lobby, “The first-born daughter gets tagged with it — for five generations now. Our great, great granny Mernie Hall was presented to Queen Victoria as being the most beautiful girl in Scotland. Maybe I should go back and tweak the face to be prettier?”
“Or you could try for a better personality instead,” teased (my soon-to-be brother) Blair. — from Chapter 1
This portrait shows the expression you get when you immigrate to the new world with six children. Mernie Ramsay moved her brood from Scotland to Vancouver Island around 1905. She was a beloved matriarch for a large family, lived a simple life, worked too hard and died too young.
The drawback to portrait commissions is they leave the studio right away and few people ever get to see them. By painting my own family members (that no one else wants), I can demonstrate my style from different eras of time, and have generations of my family around the dining room table. As paintings they have perfect manners and don’t make much noise. By refinishing and painting up-cycled frames I can transform the gaudiest gold frames into pieces of art in themselves. I also gave my mother’s grandmother a fancy pair of my own earrings to dress her up to join the dinner party. We are all hoping Covid goes away so we can have them again.
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