The mystery about my mother’s 70 year-old painting has been solved thanks to Mary Kay Grimaldi, an editor with Shell Point Life magazine in Fort Myers, Florida.
In June, I wrote about how I’d received an email from a stranger, Mary Beth Bower, who had come across an oil painting in a Florida thrift store that she thought might have been painted by my mother, Jean Earley. The canvas was dated 1945, and after seeing it, I was able to confirm that it was one of mother’s earliest paintings even though I’d never seen it before and didn’t know it existed. It was not listed in the portfolio of my mother’s work that she kept. She painted it two years after marrying my father when she was 26 years old. As newly weds, my parents had moved to Colorado from the East Coast to begin their life together. The painting was a scene that my mother could see from their tiny apartment, I later learned. My mother died at age 94 in December 2013. My father died fourteen months later, also at age 94. (Read blog about mystery painting.)