Lee, I’d never thought about such a thing until recently. My daughter was the one who suggested it. A friend who is an artist/collector/former Art Professor agreed with her. I do not have a huge amount of money invested here. It is just a reflection of art during my lifetime. I didn’t even think I was collecting art. That was something rich people do, I thought. I grew up like a lot of people thinking original art was in museums. As a young wife and mother living on my father in law’s ranch I discovered some paintings in a storage room. I couldn’t believe someone had shoved them in there, one had been stepped through. I think when his wife, my husbands mother, died, people who helped take of the family had no idea they were originals, or maybe even cared. I salvaged three, one oil and two pastels. They were landscapes done in the early thirties by a classically trained local artist. I put them up on the wall. I lived on that ranch for five years and when it was sold I took them with me. This was 1960, just months later living in a college town a woman came by the business where I was working to sell art produced by her husband, head of the art department, and herself. I didn’t have enough money to buy the pieces they had framed and offered for sale, but she carried a portfolio with unframed work by both of them. That is how it started. I could buy interesting work for lunch money. I just never stopped. According to Michael my friend who is an artist. I was lucky because the things in that portfolio weren’t the commercial work but the things they were doing to stretch and learn. Maybe the only time in my life that have only a little bit of money paid off. Most of the work I’ve collected through the years were done by emerging artists. The thing I’d like to teach or share is you too can have art in your home. But for the accident of circumstance I might be decorating my walls from a furniture store instead of the artists. Wouldn’t it be great for this work to be shown at eye level in grade schools. Where they could really see and touch it? None of these are precious. They are real work done by real people over a period of almost 50 years. Wishful thinking? My son has collected old stuff his whole life, old car memorabilia, old military memorabilia and old Oregon artifacts and memorabilia. He now fills display cabinets with historical Oregon memorabilia and loans them to small museums all over the state.

Vivvy, My daughter produces her own art and also has a collection she started for herself in her twenties, besides she is drawn to different work. I wouldn’t want to burden her with what she grew up around. Books, Art, Music [jazz] and Gourmet Food are my life so my kids have a bigger burden than you do. My daughter lives in NYC so she won’t have space for mom’s stuff, she’s had to give or store things of her own because of small spaces and my son’s wife can barely tolerate all the old stuff he collects and I can’t really fault her, as a young bride she had old car parts under her bed. I remember telling her before the wedding, love David love his old car parts. Now she tolerates having 1906 Ford taking up one of the spaces in her garage. See my message to Lee above for a partial solution. I don’t know what to do with my books. I had to trick a nephew and his wife to take the Harvard Classics I grew up with. When she said at least they are pretty I knew they were safe. Oh Heck! My art work isn’t pretty it is interesting.