My Mom! (1927-2022)
She started painting as she transitioned into retirement from her stellar career as a math professor. There’s a math endowment in her name for aspiring young mathematician women at Brevard College where she taught for 37 years. (If you’d like to support these young women, go to the Brevard College Endowment Page, choose Named Scholarship/Project and input “Rachel Daniels Endowment Scholarship for Mathematics”.)
As a painter, my mom signed her first works “Early Rachel”—then continued signing this way for the next 30 years. Won several awards for her water colors. As you can probably tell from the art, her heart was happiest in the Western North Carolina mountains. She frequently joked that she would paint the ocean—if she could only find a way to work a mountain into the waves.
Once Live Caught was complete, I realized many of my scenes, at least in my head, came right out of her artwork. Not sure whether I first saw the art, then created the scenes, or if her imaginings became such strong characters in my own life, in my own heart, that they simply inserted themselves onto my pages.
Either way, I just love perusing her paintings, and I hope you do too.
