Painting a Mountain

Mount Baker is a two hour drive from where my grandmother lives and on fair days its snowy peaks can be seen standing proudly on the horizon. My grandmother, who is notoriously difficult to please, never fails to admire this view.

Very rarely does my grandmother deign to request, but one sunny afternoon as fall slipped into winter, she demanded my uncle stop the car so she could have her picture taken. In the picture, my grandmother stands by the side of a country road not too far from her home with Mt. Baker gleaming in the distance.

I was so taken with the photograph, I was inspired to paint it.

If you have never painted a picture of your grandmother before, I recommend it. It is a time of reckoning. It takes a long time to paint a picture, especially for an amateur like me. The process will give you plenty of time to consider your origins.

My grandmother was born in 1913, the fifth and last child of a Saskatchewan sharecropper with mayoral aspirations who left his wife a penniless widow when he was kicked by a startled horse. With no apparent means of paying the rent, my great-grandmother was evicted from the farm she and her husband had worked so hard to build. To meet expenses, she moved her five young children to a house in town, made a bedroom in the attic for them, and took in borders. It was here, living with the unmarried schoolteachers and the railroad men who needed someone to cook their meals, that my grandmother learned resilience and developed a deep understanding of privacy and etiquette. She worked most of her life and saw both her children through university keeping her house, garden, and reputation spotless the entire time. At 99, this formidable woman is still living on her savings and a small pension.

It has been a long and winding road from my grandmother to me. I am quite certain that she never intended to have an entitled, educated, outspoken, and liberal minded, too loud granddaughter. This is a lesson that can be consulted when making any plans.

Indeed it was a lesson learned when I faced the task of reconciling my mind’s image of my painting with the brush strokes I ultimately made. Repeatedly the parts I thought would be easy proved difficult. Bits that seemed hopelessly ugly turned out to be beautiful. Ultimately, we have little control over events and even less control of the people around us. In leadership, it is best to embrace the strengths and weaknesses, both our own and those of whom we lead. Mistaking our intentions with the final product is to create unnecessary conflict and miss the accidental beauty that comes from our everyday experience.

Mary and her Mountain