Watercolor Stories - Polish Baltic Coast
This photo is probably one of my favorites of the ones that have been scanned and uploaded thus far. I’ve spent a good bit of time admiring it before I started painting it. I didn’t even know it existed until recently.
Everything about it is perfect to me. The way she’s smiling, relaxed, the way the ocean disappears in the background gives it this aire of a nostalgic, dreamlike state. This is the kind of photo you admire with Dario Lessing’s Sehnsucht or Aurelius’s Water playing in the background. Looking at my mother as a child, knowing it didn’t even cross her mind at the time the photo was taken that her future, adult child would be looking back at her, let alone painting a copy of this in color.
I gave the completed painting to her for Mother’s Day this year, along with the one of her childhood home that I shared with you in a previous post. It was in her hands a week before she, my father, and my middle brother with Downs Syndrome (for whom they are still full time caregivers) were scheduled to board a plane to go visit family in Poland for the first time in many years, possibly even decades at this point. I wished them safe travels, along with a request for more photos and collected stories to turn this into a bigger project (as well as some Polish-made-and-branded watercolors, if they happened to stop in any art stores while they’re there… doesn’t hurt to ask, right?).
This past year, my parents have been going through old photos. First, there was a folder of photos and documents that my father shared with me, just a handful of them, ones that his late brother had scanned in years ago. We got to discussing a number of them, and he explained what he could from memory, though he admitted that his oldest and only remaining brother would know more. After all, there’s a 15-year gap between them with my dad being the youngest. Also, my uncles, having remained in Poland their entire lives, were better able to collect these stories and artifacts of his family’s past than my father who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain with my mom at the young age of 28.
I’m not sure if this was the motivating factor behind my father’s recent project, but he took it upon himself to scan my mother’s old photos as a birthday gift to her and shared the folder with me. As I started going through them, I would ask my mom questions - something I wish I had started doing earlier. I wish I had written everything down that I knew.
Maybe someday I can compile the stories and art into a book. I would love for this to be of the same essence as the gouache diaries of Maira Kalman. I find their stories fascinating. Some of the stories I’d been told, I would listen to anyone telling them to me, parent or not. They’re that good.
Here’s a newspaper clipping of an interview with my grandfather (pictured in the article), written in Polish. For those who can read Polish, I redacted his last name for privacy.
My mother spent three summers going to summer camp on the Baltic Sea. These were organized by Autosan, where my grandfather worked, for the children of the factory workers. The photo above that inspired my painting was taken during one of these trips. The beautiful ruched, sheath swimsuit (which she recalled was a vivid navy color with white piping stripes) was gifted to her by her aunt, who she believes purchased it in Israel and shipped it to their home. Personally, I’m a huge fan of this style and find it to be far more flattering to feminine figures of all shapes and sizes, far more than today’s sausage tubes with straps (you know, the kinds that flatten the curves you want to keep and emphasize the ones you’d rather not). Like watercolor, there is a point at which you overwork a design until it looks worse than what you started with. She didn’t mention the color of the oil-paper umbrella, so I made an educated guess - and I thought the golden yellow of the umbrella would contrast nicely against the sea and her swimsuit, and it gives her this halo effect like in medieval paintings - the child innocent.
What’s interesting is that on my birthday (which fell on Mothers’ Day) they sent me scanned photos of myself as a child, ones that I don’t recall seeing before now, though I’m sure they had them in a frame somewhere. One of the photos they sent me was this one, taken decades after her beach photo, in a completely different setting, in a completely different country (and definitely not the same parasol, as she owned neither the one in the beach photo nor this one). I mean, obviously the art on the parasol is different, but could you imagine if it were the same print?
These summer camps were most likely located on the Gulf of Gdańsk, which is somewhat protected from the greater Baltic Sea. Having spent two weeks there myself while attending a sailing camp, we never experienced tall waves. At most, you’d get white peaks on the waves in stormy weather. I added a bit of oomf to the waves in my painting for visual interest, based off other photos I’d seen from the Baltic Sea, but the original photo is how I remember the sea in that area on a day-to-day basis.
She had mostly fond memories of these summer camp excursions. She credits them with teaching her many of her cooking skills - in particular when it comes to peeling potatoes. The kids would take turns having kitchen duty, where they had to prepare meals for the entire camp. To this day, she prefers peeling them with a paring knife, and prides herself on her ability to take just the skin off, leaving most of the potato intact. This is a skill she tried to teach me on several occasions, but I simply do not have the patience or focus for peeling potatoes (sorry mom, there are paintings that need painting), so a potato peeler will do. Apparently, I am like her sister in this, who also prefers using a potato peeler to a paring knife (I guess my aunt did not attend these summer camps).
My mother also reminisced beachcombing for tiny raw amber chips (her favorite stone), though she never found any that were gemstone quality. This is, after all, where Baltic amber comes from, and you can often find pieces of it washed up on beaches, especially after a storm. The Amber Road is among one of the most ancient trade routes in Europe, and cut through the heart of Poland.
Unfortunately, there was one bad experience that she recalled, the summer that she and several other campers contracted Chicken Pox soon after arriving at camp. She remembered feeling pretty miserable, though she attempted to get through the activities before she became too sick to continue. As soon as the staff realized what it was, the sick kids were quarantined away from the rest of the camp. Initially the parents were informed that they would need to come collect their kids. The problem was that most people didn’t own cars or have much in the way of expendable money. The kids were bussed there by the company, and now they expected the parents to figure out how to get them back home over 700 kilometers away.
Eventually, the company realized this was an unreasonable ask and was able to find a bus to transport the sick kids back to their parents. The bus had bench seats which faced each other, so the staff placed something in the gaps between the seats and covered the entire seat/table area to turn them into temporary beds. Then she and the other sick kids endured the long, all-day trip back home. It’s at this point my mother added that my grandmother was relieved that my aunt was away from home at the time, so she wouldn’t also get sick. Unfortunately, my aunt ended up catching Chicken Pox years later as a young adult while working as a physician (or resident?). As miserable as it may be to suffer with this illness as a child, it’s far more dangerous and potentially deadly when you catch it as an adult.
To add to the story above, when I was a kid - about the same age as my mom was when she got it - my youngest brother brought Chicken Pox home from school. Then my middle brother caught it. Then I caught it. Then my dad, who’d never had it before, caught it and suffered complications with it (respiratory infection from what I remember). Since my mom caught it at the camp all those years ago, she was the only one lucky enough to not share in our collective misery directly. My dad is the type of person you’ll never catch lying down unless he feels like death, and I remember him spending a week sleeping on the couch. At least he doesn’t do the whole man-cold display, he just couldn’t be of any assistance. My poor mother proceeded to care for all of us, having us take turns taking Epsom salt baths and then carefully and patiently dabbing each blister with calamine lotion using a Q-tip, because to rub it on would aggravate the rash. I remember looking at my polka-dotted self in the mirror when she was done, feeling rather despondent at the sight (of myself covered in the plague of course, not of her loving gesture of providing me with a bit of relief, for which I was obviously grateful), before getting dressed and plodding back to my bed.
I can’t imagine caring for three kids and an adult with Chicken Pox without needing a vacation afterwards. On the other hand, maybe this was one of the quietest several weeks she ever had with all of us home. After all, I certainly had no energy to run around the house, and I’m pretty sure my brothers stayed in bed most of the time as well. At most, I’m sure she heard us whining incessantly about feeling itchy. So, this bad experience at camp not only potentially saved her life, we all know moms don’t get to take a break when they’re sick. It’s bad enough caring for an entire family with it, but at least she was spared from going through it herself and still trying to manage being a parent at the same time.
Enough stories of plagues and pestilence. I present the completed watercolor painting of the photo below, free from Chicken Pox.
