Edgar Allan Poe  c Kristin Helberg 2012

Edgar Allan Poe is certainly in the news right now with the new John Cusack movie coming out this week.   During the last few months, I attended some birthday celebrations here in Baltimore honoring Edgar Allan Poe at Westminster Hall where he was finally laid to rest.    I decided that I wanted to read everything that I could about him and then attempt to create a portrait worthy of this creative genius.

He was born Edgar Poe in New England on January 19, 1809 but was soon orphaned when his father abandoned him and his mother died.    The Allan family of Richmond, VA took himin and provided him with the Allan name.  But they never formally adopted him,  which was a painful thorn in his side for the rest of his life.  It is believed that like many other men of creative genius, such as Vincent Van Gogh, that Poe suffered from right temporal lobe seizure which heightened his creative sensibilities.  Unfortunately any amount of alcohol was not a good mix with this chronic condition.

He parted ways with the Allan Family after he failed at West Point, married a 13 year old cousin, and began his life as a writer. His young wife died two years later.  Poe embarked on   a successful but  stormy career as a writer of the macabre, a poet and a literary critic.    A string of romances with a series of women caused some scandal, his bouts with drinking and long periods of poverty were to continue for Poe for years.

It was in 1849 that he reunited with his first love, Elimira Royster   Shelton in Richmond, Virginia and the two had agreed to an engagement leading towards marriage.   Poe had sworn off alcohol and was traveling to New York City to begin a new literary journal.   No one truly knows what happened on his stopover in Baltimore on his way to New York, but he was found stripped of his normal elegant clothes, wearing rough working man’s apparel and raving mad in a bar in the Fells Point area of the city.   Many accounts of the incident believe that Poe had been drugged and perhaps used in a political voting fraud scheme.   He died in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849 at the age of 40.

His arch rival Rufis Griswold seized the opportunity to write both a libelous obit and memoir of Edgar Allan Poe accusing him of being a drunken, womanizing madman.   His poor fiance only found out his death by reading about  it in the newspaper.

Poe will always be recognized as one our most original American writers and the creator of a new genre of writing known as the detective story.

I look forward to seeing the movie this week.   Check out this website to find out more about Poe.  www.poemuseum.org

Our Family Tree c Kristin Helberg 2012

The original Mary’s Center was started in a basement in 1988 by Maria Gomez who was working as a nurse at the District of Columbia’s Department of Health.   Maria witnessed the large increase in the Latin American immigrants coming to the US to escape war, poverty and death.   Many of her female patients had been raped and arrived in the United States without  prenatal care.  With funding from the DC Mayor’s office on Latino Affairs and the DC Department of Health, she started her first basement clinic.

Over the years, Maria who is currently the President and CEO of Mary’s Center, gradually moved from the basement clinic to larger facilities  to provide help to a wider population of the uninsured in Washington, DC.  First lady, Michelle Obama, honored Maria Gomez, by making her first DC community visit as the new first lady to Maria’s clinic in 2009. Now the new Georgia Avenue center is a Federally qualified Health Center that provides health, social and education to the under-insured and uninsured population of metropolitan Washington.

Visit their website at www.mary’scenter.org for information about donations or volunteer opportunities.

Grandma Moses c Kristin Helberg 1996, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

In May of 2011, my portrait of Grandma Moses was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian as part of their permanent collection.   It is currently on display there at the museum in Washington with other recent acquisitions and the show will be up until the end of October 2012.

I was born in upstate New York and my family moved away.  But on frequent visits to visit my grandparents, my mother would drive us by the area in Hoosick Falls, NY where Grandma Moses’s farm was located with the hopes that we would catch a glimpse of her.   We never did, but I admired her greatly.    In 1996, I made the portrait of Grandma Moses, working with photographs of her painting in her kitchen studio.   I made sure to show the Maxwell coffee cans that she used to hold her paints and her little work table with the painted scenes on either end.

Maryl Robertson Moses, aka, Grandma Moses is a woman we can all admire.   She ran her farm, raised her children and did not even begin painting until she was in her 70′s creating a career for herself and international acclaim.

The younger children made paper Chinese Dragon puppets, portraits of Pandas, kites and working models of the abacus, the ancient Chinese calculator.  The folding screen and other art will be on display at the Walters Art Museum here in Baltimore on April 28th with a party to celebrate the children’s accomplishment.

Along with the usual celebration at Graceland, there are special Elvis cruises leaving Florida next week packed with hundreds of Elvis Impersonators.

This painting that I created called Bill and Elvis, is part of the permanent collection at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Enjoy!

 The sun is pouring in through my windows.  It is both a new day and a new year.  Everyone likes to exault you with wishes for good fortune and success in the New Year.   But I think that success is always relative and to be content, you must always return to that truth.   I admire friends who have decided to be content with the life that they have.   I wish that for you. 

The National Archives Museum sells my vinegar grained boxes and framed fraktur in their gift shop at the Museum location in Washington, DC at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Fraktur are illustrated documents recording weddings, baptism and birth.  My fraktur art is derivitive of the Pennsylvania Dutch style.

This year the museum is trying an American Artisans Fair to honor and promote a group of American Artisans and they will be featuring my boxes and fraktur in the show as well as 6 painted and grained chairs that I delivered to the Museum yesterday.   The chairs are all antique some of them dating back to 1880 and I have added vinegar graining and Early American motifs such as the Tree of Life image seen in quilts.

The fair will have several private showings for members and the board of directors but it will be open to the public on Friday December 2 and Tuesday December 6 from 10 am to 5 pm.   I hope to see you there.   The fair is being held at the museum at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.  Not only will they have housewares but they will be offering jewelry and apparel as well.

My friend George Frazier sells a wonderful assortment of hand-made baskets at his booth in the Downtown Farmers Market every Sunday morning here in Baltimore.   He carries the famous Peterboro baskets which have been produced here in the United States since before the Civil War, river grass baskets made by a woman’s free trade cooperative in Ghana and baskets made in Lancaster by an Amish craftsman.   

Greorge Frazier's Basket Booth

 If you don’t live here in Baltimore, you visit George at his website at www.baskits.net   He will gladly ship to you.   Have a lovely holiday gathering. 

In 2004, I made a satirical portrait of him, eluding to his rumored transvestite escapades, when he assumed his alternate personality known as “Mary”.   I felt it was pay-back time for Mr. Hoover for all the horrible things he had done to people such as Dr. Martin Luther King and to Melvin Purvis, the star of the FBI who expunged all the famous outlaws, including John Dillinger.  

J. Edgar Hoover c Kristin Helberg 2004