Painting My Wild West Grandpa

Painting on Location one Afternoon

Painting The Spirit of Reclamation, 50” x 35”, by Melissa Carmon

It was the second time I’d painted his portrait, and for the color study phase, I wanted him to be in an environment where he felt comfortable. For Grandpa that meant a chair next to a row of four-foot tall marigolds that he grew along the side of his house.  Grandpa seemed especially talented at growing things- I always wondered if it had something to do with a lifetime of farming.  His fondness for flowers stood in contrast with his wild west toughness but I noticed in him a positive love of flowers: marigolds, daffodils, hyacinths.  I began to paint, and he draped his hand over the side of his chair as he nonchalantly enjoyed the sunshine.  We chatted a bit as I mixed the colors that cascaded over his forehead: golden highlights, warm midtones, cool shadows.

The Spirit of Reclamation, 50” x 35,” Oil on Canvas, by Melissa Carmon

Suddenly, a large wasp made a swift overhead landing — a direct attack from somehwere behind my left ear and straight down onto my palette. The army-outfitted wasp which had just come straight from its morning exercises gloated over its conquest— a pile of pink paint. I had heard that wasps cannot see red the same as humans do, but Old Holland’s Brilliant Rose, milled with Dutch Windmills and pressed into silver tubes in Holland must have had something special in it.  I shot up from my seat, abandoning my palette in the process, and with the palette on my chair and my arms in the air, I tried to shoo the assailant away.  It seemed to relent and melted into the summer air. After checking the edges of my chair a few times to be sure it was gone, I tentatively resumed the painting.  Grandpa and I resumed our chat as the adrenaline began to wane a bit in my system, and I started to work on mixing the next string of colors.  

Then up from the underside of the palette, with the suddenness of a snapping turtle reaching out and biting, or one of those fish that pretend to be buried in the sand before they sieze upon their pray, sudden shiny black legs and mandibles sized upon the region of the pink paint! The wasp!  It was a sneak attack! In an instant, it had grasped the palette with its spiny wasp feet, alive with tension, and with staccato steps, just to gain its bearings, it shot toward the pink. A stinger pulsed at the end of its sleek black abdomen- all the better to defend its new treasure- that irresistibly big shining bubblegum pink blob of Brilliant Rose.  Before all this had fully registered I had hopped up and let out a squeaking sound as the palette clattered down onto the ground and I jumped a foot away.

Grandpa, as unaffected as the marigolds that stood behind him slowly moved his gaze my way with his whole face.  “Oh,” Grandpa said softly, as his brows drew together in concern. Grandpa’s voice has a strong Lakota accent.  “Are they botherin’ ya?” He asked with unruffled but kindly concern.

Patting down my pants with my hands, I explained that I was allergic. As I regathered my palette and resumed painting, I proceeded to tell him the long list of unpleasantries that would happen if I got stung. He paused and considered.  “Oh,” he said, and considered again. Then added, “Me, too.  Well.... to bees.” I glanced involuntarily to his hand, which was within an inch and a half of the marigolds.  The bright orange flowers were alive with bees in the August sun.  “I suppose,” he continued, “If I got stung, I would need to get in a car real quick and have someone drive me to the hospital.” The way grandpa said hos-pi-tal emphasized all three syllables, and he said it with a slow, uncaring, mater-of-fact tone, as though merely repeating what someone else had told him, and he said it with the mildest hint of distain.  “In fact,” here he paused and then continued, “If I got stung, I am supposed to have one of those... oh what do you call them?” And he made a shot-like gesture at his arm and looked at me.  “You stick yourself?” “Oh!” I said. “An epi pen?” “Yeah, somethin’ like that.  Well, I had one of those, once, in my glovebox... I was supposed to carry it around with me.  And well, you’re supposed to get a new one every ten years or so, or they get ‘cloudy’.  And mine got old and cloudy.  So I threw it away.  And that was the end of that.”

“What!” I interjected. “So you never got a new one?”

“No.” Grandpa looked the lightest bit pleased. I knew arguing was useless, and so instead, I had to smile.  

I inquired about when he realized he was allergic to bees, and what happens to him of he gets stung. He explained that he hadn’t always been allergic.  But one day in the summer, back on the farm, he was out with his tractor.  He drove near a tree and perhaps he hit a low hanging branch accidentally that had a bees nest in it.  Something had provoked them. A swam of bees attacked him and flew after the tractor.  He tried to out run them with the tractor and shoo them off, but even though he drove as fast as he could toward home, the swarm of stinging bees kept pace with him.  Somehow, the bees had managed to get up under his hat.  He had 20 or 30 stingers in his head and dying bees in his hair when he got home. Since that time his body had developed a reaction.  He described what happened when he had been stung since - the swelling and trouble breathing and finally the prescription of the epi pen.  I was shocked.

Meanwhile, as he talked and I painted, the bees buzzed around the contours of his hand, and they seemed happily engrossed in the marigolds.  

“Grandpa! I said, “What about these bees!”— I gestured at his hand in the flowers.  “Do you need to be careful?”

“Oh,” he said, with simplicity, and if it had not occurred to him. Without moving his hand, he said in his measured way,  “They don’t bother me.”

 I, on the other hand, felt jumpy and kept imagining the wasp re-landing on the side of my palette, and couldn’t stop thinking of grandpa, one bee sting away from anaphylactic shock.  Every time I thought I felt something, I startled a bit.  After about a half an hour he said, “Are they botherin’ ya?”  There was no judgement in it, only kindness.  “We can go inside.”  It was true, they were bothering me, and I had to honestly answer yes.  So even though I knew that he was enjoying the sun, I packed up the paints and the palette, and we made our way up the steps to the front door. I finished the study for the portrait as we talked at his kitchen table.  

St. Columbanus, 60” x 35,” Oil on Panel, by Melissa Carmon

Grandpa passed away in 2018, about two months before the opening of the Eternal Color Series show, of which this portrait of him was a part.