My best estimate is that she averaged selling between fifteen and twenty paintings per year, from nineteen sixty-six to around nineteen ninety. After that, she continued to sell in smaller numbers for a few years, and still managed to paint some commissioned works for another year or so..

I adored watching her paint. One time, when I was about ten or eleven, I suggested that she might apply a very light pink tint around the image of an antique lamp that she was painting. She thought about it a moment while gazing at the canvas, then made my suggested change! It was exactly what the painting needed to be finished! I know that’s true because she told me so. I always considered that one to be our special painting, the one that I helped her finish, and was both thrilled and sad when she told me it had been sold. Several days later, I decided I was more thrilled than sad, when she said it was only fair to share the revenue on a shared effort, and gave me five dollars.

Her most common painting subjects were old barns, and landscapes from around Ottertail County, Minnesota. They included lake, pond, and river scenes, bridges, and local landmarks. There must be at least twenty-five versions of a place called Phelp’s Mill hanging in living rooms around the country. She also painted many canvasses of fish houses on Ottertail Lake in winter. The lake was visible through the living room and kitchen windows of her house. The endless variety of ever-shifting patterns of fish houses and snow drifts, along with different foregrounds presented through different windows made this a very interesting series of oil paintings.

Although she preferred painting in oils, she experimented with many different mediums. One of my favorite works was done in pastel chalk. It was of a small, towheaded boy, sitting on a rock in a pasture and trying to pick a splinter or thorn from his foot. There is a crude, homemade fishing pole and tin can of worms on the ground nearby. However, in my opinion she was truly masterful when she worked with watercolors. She didn’t do a lot of work in watercolors though, because she always thought the medium was too easy. It felt too much like just practicing or playing around, to her. That is a shame, because the subtle shadings and hints of things not quite in focus that she managed to bring to her watercolor works can be breathtaking. Even more than the many beautiful oils she created, the watercolors are alive with evocation of emotions and memories, and full of things about to happen.

I still feel a thrill, and a few moments of warmth, when I enter a cafe or office on business in that part of the state, and see one of her paintings on display. It always brings to mind a day that my stepmother was helping Grandma check in at a hospital for chemotherapy sessions, a year or so before her passing. The young intern that was doing the paperwork started to enter the word housewife on the occupation line of the registration form, when she stopped him.

“I,” she said, “am an artist!”

She most certainly was.