On our Italian trips I always had a sketchpad along, sometimes I painted small oils, as I always did while we vacationed in Portofino. Dad would sit reading next to me while I drew or painted, and he traipsed around with me looking for locations to shoot my 8-millimeter movies. When I wanted to make a film of some of the statues in the Logia in Florence, and said I would like some young pretty girl to walk through the shots as part of my movie, Dad hired a beautiful young Dutch girl we met in San Marco's and paid her for several hours of work, so I could get my shots.
Many years later in 1983, the year before Dad died and when he was already very ill — he was in St. Mary's hospital at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — I went out, found an art supply store, and then sat down next to Dad and painted and drew for two days. I worked from memory, producing drawings of favorite places, the Dents Du Midi at night, views of Portofino, Florence, a mother and child, and several paintings of my heavily-outlined, over-sized apples and leaves. (I hadn't painted for over ten years.)
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Roses Scattered from the Sky © Frank Schaeffer |
I pinned and propped up the art all around my father turning his hospital room into an impromptu gallery. The warm friendly scent of the linseed oil overwhelmed that hospital smell. I held Dad and we cried together. And Dad answered my thoughts when he said right out of the blue, "We had fun in Florence, didn't we boy?"
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