The internet is way cool. I get emails all the time like the one I got this morning. Somebody gets to googling something or another, they stumble across a story I wrote years ago, and then they email me.
It’s fun.
Back in the old days of journalism, my news articles ended up at the bottom of parakeet cages, quickly forgotten. Occasionally I’d be telephoned by a parakeet who’d read an article just prior to covering it with his own feces. But phone conversations with parrots are overrated.
Me: “Hello?”
Parakeet: “Hello. Hello.”
Me: “Can I help you?”
Parakeet: “Hello.”
I prefer the modern age when somebody like this guy named Gerald from California emails to say he read this cover story from five years ago about Fort Worth artist Olive Pemberton. Gerald had recently been bequeathed four of her paintings, and now he wants to know more about them.
Here are the four images he sent me. They are nice paintings but not among Pemberton’s best works. She’s done some incredible paintings of Fort Worth settings (click on the link above to see a few, along with works by her now deceased sister Jan Holmes).
I prefer Pemberton’s paintings that feature striking colors and thick paint. Gerald’s newly acquired paintings are a bit muted color wise, but they’re not bad, and it’s always cool to see Pemberton originals from the 1950s and 1960s. I’d hang any one of them on my wall, although I particularly like the umbrella painting.
That’s the best thing about art, it’s timeless. How smart of him to call you for more information on the artist!
Good to know that our Fort Worth artists are known even out in la la land. Good art is good art wherever it is. Thanks, Jeff and the Weekly, for doing good stuff about good old Fort Worth and its talented artists. Keep it up.