My late Aunt Ida was a prolific oil painter, and unfortunately we have no idea where her paintings went, other than the four that we have in our house. This mountain painting, which is pretty small compared to the one of the country house, was just found in my Dad’s files. It is nice that we have a fairly diverse collection, even if it is only four pieces.

Work like this is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of “Modern Art”, where people just toss two or three cans of paint on a canvas and declare the result “Artwork”. Or drawing two rectangles on a white canvas, and if you don’t “get it”, than you aren’t sophisticated enough to understand how ground-breaking it is.

Declaring things that are ugly, visually chaotic, insultingly simple, childish, and lazily random to be great art is what happens when standards no longer exist. My aunt learned a craft, practiced it prolifically, and the result were paintings that are unique and beneficial to the soul.