Paintings adorned the interior walls of nearly every room at Angelkeep. Bluffton’s historical commercial artist and watercolorist, Harry Lindstrand, was well represented in two rooms. A favorite depicted a competition involving Guernsey cows that Harry painted at the event in Uniondale.
A garage wall remained covered nearly frame-to-frame with college art school works that never shook up the world but were kept to conjure up memories of the late 1960s.
Groupings of miniature oils represented trips to Europe.
One delightful mini oil painting had been purchased from a street artist after finding the vendor hawking his wares just outside the exit of the Louvre in Paris.
Another from the Montmartre village of Paris had just been completed by its artist. Paint remained wet when the purchase occurred. The “starving artist” seemed as thrilled with the sale as was the purchaser. It depicted a window scene with a flower-box loaded with blooms. It became a reminder of so many such sights observed all over the city. It brought back a flood of memories even though it was hung on the wall of an insignificant room. It brightened up the laundry room by hanging over the clothes washer.
It was signed, not by a Monet, Renoir, or van Gogh, but a name unreadable and eventually forgotten. Vivid colors remained. Angelkeep blooms often matched the vivid colours (as Europe spelled it) combination that reached out on that Montmartre afternoon from the window box oil painting. Birds offered some of the same colors, but they seldom gathered together as tightly as those blooms in the Montmartre box.
One Angelkeep critter managed matching the multi-color affair nicely. A painted turtle had been spotted sunning itself on a few floating reed stalks about 15 feet offshore. Photos were taken, but no oil painting resulted. It was not the first painted turtle discovered living in and around Angelpond. It became the first sighted for over a decade.
Forgive Angelkeep Journals if today’s story became a repeat of a painted turtle column from over a decade ago. Like the Montmartre village artist’s name, a former painted turtle story also became lost in history — if it existed. Like the Montmartre window-flower-box painting, the mix of colors, side by side on the turtle, made it Angelkeep-unique.
Angelkeep Journals formerly wrote many a turtle yarn. The primary turtles of the pond, being snappers, relied on antics to become newspaper content. In the past they laid eggs, caught tossed baguette hunks, raced across grass, and charged up the pond’s embankment toward the grill on a cookout day. Snappers displayed nothing but muddy brown colors, unless bits of green moss began growing on the shell or forehead. That happened directly over the eyes, looking like green eyebrows, to one snapper that earned the name Groucho, as in the Marx Brothers.
Painted turtle displayed a palette of hues. That’s artist-speak for paint board and colors. A painted turtle’s head contained lines and dashes of color in the manner of Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” oil. Painted turtle’s head hues included Hooker’s green, olive, and chartreuse, with bits where yellow green accented. Other skin areas included red, orange, and yellow, in a myriad of variations, as was the case with Angelkeep’s newly observed specimen.
The shell appeared dark, a deep greenish-black that could easily pass itself off as an Italian bronze statue patina after a century of exposure. Dividing this area, a yellow-green mortar-like segmenting line, made the shell top appear to be something of a Tiffany work, sans the glass and color of which Tiffany became noted. The underside of a painted turtle’s shell took on spots of delightful reds like scarlet and vermilion which often wrapped around the shell and peeked out on the upper side. Those same reds, with a lean toward cadmium, appeared on the neck when the painted turtle decided to show off and stretch its head forward to full extension.
Painted turtles have history, like Harry’s Uniondale Guernsey watercolor. Harry received a permanent cow-kicked injury during its painting. News-Banner covered the incident.
Painted turtles historically moved north to Indiana after the glacier retreated, about 11,000 years ago. It seemed interesting that nobody labeled that “global warming.”
Angelkeep should have painted an oil of a painted turtle to hang over the clothes dryer to balance the laundry’s Montmartre exhibit.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
