How about some info. about Grandma Moses?

Question:

How about some info. about Grandma Moses?

aka Anna Mary Robertson. =]

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The first person quoted Wikipedia - the dates are correct, but her life was quite different - and quite fascinating.

She painted all of her life - she didn't start in her 70's.

First Wikipedia error - her father was a wannabe artist and would bring home leftover newsprint from the newspaper (a brand new thing in the 1860s). Her brothers would use charcoal to draw locomotives, she would use berries to draw "pretty pictures."

One of her earliest memories was going into town with her mother and the town was shrouded in black. Her mother went into the store and found out that President Lincoln had been assasinated. She came out and said to Anna Mary, "What will become of us now?"

As a child, she only went to school until sixth grade, when she was hired to work on a farm. She married in her late 20s to a fellow worker at a farm. They left on their wedding night to go down south where he had a job offer working with horses. One night they arrived in the Shenandoah Valley where a storekeeper told them a teacher had a farm available. They decided not to go further and bought it. Anna Mary bought cows to make butter. She was very frugal (got it from her mom), and loaned her husband money - he was a farmer. She even introduced potato chips to Virginia!

They had ten children, five died in infancy.

When she and her husband lived in the Shenandoah Valley, wallpaper was the big thing - instead, she painted murals on her walls. She painted using housepaints and sometimes smashed the ends of sticks for paintbrushes. She painted many paintings on wallboard, or whatever she could find. She liked cardboard because it had two paint-able sides. Her husband once gave her a window from a train to paint on, and the two-sided painting still exists today. She may have been a little OCD about painting. She once painted an antique desk someone gave her, and even did decoupage on it. She loved to cut pictures from Currier & Ives.

The most expensive part of her paintings were the frames - but she felt the frame was very important. So she would go into neighbors' attics to find old paintings, take them out of the frames, and cut her wallboard to fit the frame, and then paint the wallboard. One of the things she did was sort-of gusso the wallboard bright white, and that's why her paintings are so full of color.

After she and her husband moved back from Virginia to upstate New York, he died, and then her daughter got very sick. She moved to Vermont for awhile to live with her son-in-law to take care of her two granddaughters. When her son-in-law re-married, Anna Mary moved back to her NY farm. Her son-in-law's new wife wanted to turn the basement of the Vermont house into a place for the girls to play, but there was a stack of Anna Mary's paintings about five feet high. They took all the paintings to the Bennington, Vermont dump.

She painted 1500 paintings between the time she was discovered (age 70) and her death at 101. She was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow when she was 95, and she outlived him!

There is much more to the story, but I've run out of time!