Grandma Moses: Secrets of Success
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A Story of Yankee Knowhow
I learned a lot from Grandma Moses' life, and she became one of my heroes. Besides the affection I have for the childlike, yet surprisingly telling paintings she produced, I was captured by her grit, no-nonsense approach to life, and optimism. Her life holds some secrets of success for a person of any time or place. We can learn from her Yankee knowhow.
What is Yankee Knowhow?
It is setting your sights on a goal to accomplish, then setting about the hard work of getting the job done. Knowing how to use ingenuity to do a job better, while buckling down and applying elbow grease when necessary are also a part of the recipe. It is a mix of the right attitude and determined hard work. Probably best exemplified by the biographies of some of the people of American history and culture, like Grandma Moses. There is a certain amount of grit and tenacity involved as well.
How to succeed like Grandma Moses? Read on.
Success Can Be Learned
How to succeed like Grandma Moses
Before Fame, Simple Hard Work
Yankee Attitude Forged
She was born Anna Mary Robertson, in 1860. The nation was about to enter the crucible of the Civil War when Anna Mary entered the world of "green meadows and wild woods on a farm in Washington County" in New York. She was the oldest girl,tird born, in a large Scots-Irish family of ten children, and while those days were commonly filled with many chores, she remembered them as happy and carefree. Being industrious and frugal were highly regarded qualities and set the pattern of her life.She had the normal bit of schooling for girls of her age in that time, but soon was "hired out" to earn her living as household help at age twelve.Although the workload was one we would consider heavy, she felt she was treated kindly, as one of the family. At age 26 Anna Mary had moved on to another position where she met the "hired man", Thomas Salmon Moses. They married and decided to move to the South, to Virginia, where they took up farming.
It was in Virginia that Grandma Moses put her skills to work alongside her husband, and cleverly started her own business making butter that exceeded anything else available thereabouts. She was successful enough to finance two cows, and had the idea to brand her own butter with a butter mold her husband carved for her. That was followed by jams and jellies for sale, before deciding to move back to their New York beginnings. Taking up dairy farming, it was there that Grandma Moses engaged in all the routines and pastimes that would later fill her pictures. She had become a successful farm wife, capable of running her own business engined by her skills and talent.
Grandma Moses embroidered art
Always keeping busy with farm chores, housework, and raising her children, it was no different as she got older and was widowed. Yet her stories tell of good humored fun which embroidered her life. She took up making literally embroidered pictures, of little landscapes, until her sister suggested painting instead. She approached painting with her same desire to keep busy and her career was born. It took only the interest of a traveler through the town of Hoosick Falls, where Grandma Moses had put her pictures on display in a store window. Thus began what became an estimated more than 1600 canvases of paintings that she started out selling for two and three dollars each (or three to five depending on who tells the story), but ended up now sold for tens of thousands.
Grandma Moses Art
For More Grandma Moses Paintings
The Right Time For Folk Art
Grandma Moses, At Seventy, Begins As An Artist
Grandma Moses was always self taught and had a sense of what she thought were "pretty pictures". Her style was just what the public wanted to see when her naive, but colorful and narrative paintings were revealed along with an appealing background of a simple "farm wife's" creativity. Old fashioned tasks of corn husking, maple sugaring off for syrup, making quilts, and candle making were represented in her works and harked back to simpler times and to American virtues of diligent work in agricultural community.Grandma Moses also embodied the character of no nonsense Yankee ingenuity, able to use "Scotch thrift" to make something out of nothing, and put the best face on the circumstances of life. She was also able to transfer those sentiments through her painting.
Her subject matter was of the life she had known, but many of her works ( especially at first) borrowed from illustrations in books and Currier and Ives prints. These were used as inspiration, but her style and completed paintings were wholly her own. Often artists take elements from such diverse things as perspective, symbolic objects, or common scenes in everyday life for their compositions; it is how they put them together and their original style that sets an artist apart.
"Moses gathered her sources for the vignettes and figural groupings from popular media, such as magazine illustrations, greeting cards, and advertisements. She traced the contours of figures and buildings and incorporated them into her compositions, carefully saving the clippings for future use." ~ American Art
Using oil paints she usually painted on Masonite board. (My father used to use that for projects when I was a child, it is a brown colored pressed wood board, not very thick with a shiny side and a rough corrugated one, it is stiff, but not as heavy or strong as a slab of wood.) She usually cut the boards to a size of 2x3 feet. She also made some small paintings on dried tree mushrooms, as well as a some on ceramic tile.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
Her art became hugely popular, and found many commercial applications from greeting cards to fabrics.
The Riverdale Fabric Co., active from 1950 to 1967, was given permission to market drapery fabric designs with exact replicas of her paintings. Many enterprising people framed that fabric and made framed "wall art" from the fabrics.
Grandma Moses' Secret Recipe For Success
Tips for Success that You Can Use
- Grandma Moses made the best of her opportunities and did not complain
- She showed entrepreneurial spirit and grasped her opportunities to use her talents
- She remained cheerful and showed gratefulness for those in her life
- She was diligent, industrious, and frugal -lessons she learned early in life
- She remained true to herself and her sense of what she liked and valued
- She took pride in her work
Think About It
Grandma Moses was "discovered" by Louis Caldor, an art collector on vacation from New York City. What would have happened if she had never had her paintings in that drugstore window?
How She Painted
She liked to sit quietly and think ...remember and imagine. "Then I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it ..."
She would sit on an old, battered swivel chair, perching on two large pillows. The Masonite on which she painted would lie flat on an old kitchen table before her. There was no easel. Crowding her in her "studio" were an electric washer and dryer that had overflowed from the kitchen. -
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Can I Be The Next Grandma Moses?
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Maybe you can. Today there are so many opportunities to have your artwork noticed. An easy way to market and sell your art is Zazzle, or Etsy -if you want to sell the original pieces.Who knows? You might become a great commercial success! Like Grandma Moses did.
Want to start creating something at Zazzle? It is easy. Click on the button to start.
I Hope To Be Like Grandma
- I'm almost old enough!
Grandma Moses in the 21st Century
Learn more about the art of Grandma Moses
Grandma Moses: in the 21st Century
Amazon Price: $114.95 (as of 02/23/2012)
Art Supplies
to bring out your inner Grandma Moses
"How She Painted" quote from NYT
Perspective
Open your eyes to what can be done, don't focus on what can't.
A commemorative stamp was issued in her honor in 1969
Yankee Character
Grit, Determination, and Thrift
Seth Godin's Thoughts on Success and Grandma Moses
She illustrates his lessons for success
Seth Godin wrote a summary of the hierarchy of success. How did Grandma Moses illustrate his 6 points?Pointing out that the six points are often taken out of order, Seth gives the sequence this way:
1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Tactics
6. Execution
What can Grandma teach you about this?
She can teach you a lot about attitude. Grandma Moses had a "can do" attitude that made the best of things and didn't waste time moping about disappointments. She continually put that attitude to work for herself when moving to different parts of the country, raising her family, and becoming a great success in the hardboiled world of art. She looked at the bright side of her opportunities.
Grandma's approach to her work was pragmatic. She was practical and she had a good grasp of what she could capitalize on. Long before her art career, she looked around her community and turned her dissatisfaction with the quality of the local butter into a home industry that made it better. Her style was to find a way to meet a need with her arsenal of talents and go to work producing something that gave her pride to produce.
Her goals were simple and true to her values. Grandma didn't aim to become a great artist, she was not trying to become a V.I.P. Those were side benefits to her goals of making the most of her time and talents and keeping busy. She took advantage of opportunities to supplement her family's income, obviously viewing herself as a valued partner in building her family and contributing to those around her.
Grandma Moses had a flexible strategy to use what was at hand and make the best of it. She decided to paint, in her own words, when it seemed easier to paint a picture to give to her mailman then to "slave over a hot stove to bake a cake". One of her early works was a painting she did on a fireboard for her parlor after running out of wallpaper which she would have liked to use to cover it.
"If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens."
Grandma's tactics were geared to being faithful to expectations, and true to her Yankee values. When promising a specific number of paintings and finding she was one short, Grandma Moses simply divided a larger painting in half. She valued her promise to the buyer higher than her estimation of her production...even if the work was her own created art. Maybe that seems like a misplaced value and a destructive tactic, but it exemplifies her view of doing the best with what she had and fulfilling the needs of a customer.
Her life dictated the execution of her art. She had lived through the early times of America's most optimistic sense of where it was going, a hardworking, frugal, entrepreneurial America. Grandma Moses executed her work in just that spirit, the spirit of the age in which she had lived. She worked hard, and produced many paintings, she saw her work produced in many transformations from fabric to greeting cards. Grandma agreed to have her works disseminated throughout everyday America, just like you would expect from an icon of the American housewife of a time gone by, one of our "Grandmas".
Seth Godin and His Great Ideas
...not JUST Squidoo
" .... many of us fear too much momentum. We look at a project launch or a job or another new commitment as something that might get out of control.
...
Deep down, this potential for an overwhelming response alerts the lizard brain and we hold back. We're afraid of being part of something that feels like it might be too big for us.
Hint: it probably isn't."
wisdom from Seth Godin
Seth Godin says...
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byMore Lessons in Success
Positive Character Qualities Examined
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Grandma's Naive Painting
Inspiration for hard times
One of the reasons Grandma Moses became so famous and successful as an artist was that her optimism and portrayal of the sunny side of life was just what the nation needed after the trials of a Depression and World War. She was a magnifier of all that Americans wanted to remember of what was good in life and about themselves.
Never underestimate the power and attraction of an optimistic and intrepid view of life. People instinctively know they need such encouragement and gravitate towards those who honestly exemplify it.
Grandma's Opinion
Grandma Moses Stories
in her own words
Grandma Moses Quotations:
Born "back in the green meadows and wild woods on a farm in Washington County. Those were my happy days, free from care or worry, helping Mother, rocking sister's cradle, taking sewing lessons, from Mother, sporting with my brothers, making rafts to float over the mill pond, roaming the wild woods, gathering flowers, and building air castles."
"Once Grandma Robertson came, and she brought some tissue paper, green and pink and those colors. Oh, I was rich when I got that! Grandma was a wonderful good woman bringing me that!"
"When I went to school, the teacher would give us maps to draw, and I would make the mountains in my own way. The teacher liked them, and would ask if he might keep them."
Her view on her marriage, believing "that we were a team and I had to do as much as my husband did, not like some girls, when they sit down, and then somebody has to throw sugar at them."
"I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday...I look back on my life a good day's work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I made the best out of what life offered."
"What a strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, the other forward; one is of today, other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day."
More Grandma Moses Lenses
the art and the artist
Find Grandma's Art
bid successfuly, if you can!
Give Your Thoughts
did Grandma inspire you? How about Seth?
Thankful for the Angel Blessings:
cdevries
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pawpaw911
Oct 16, 2011 @ 5:52 am | delete
- Hers is a fascinating story.
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cdevries
Oct 4, 2011 @ 3:39 pm | delete
- Very inspiring. I love the story about cutting a painting in half in order to make up the promised number!
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RenaissanceWoman2010
May 8, 2011 @ 7:02 am | delete
- Really enjoyed this lens. I've had some of her art, but did not really know much at all about Grandma Moses. Always loved that she began painting at 70. That is inspiring in itself. Very interesting woman. Thanks for the feature.
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Ilona1
Jun 1, 2011 @ 10:31 am | delete
- so glad you enjoyed the lens- I enjoyed making it!
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Helenee
Apr 29, 2011 @ 11:13 am | delete
- "Open your eyes to what can be done, don't focus on what can't." Who told that, Grandma Moses or Seth Godin? It's my motto since a few years ago - when I became sooo tired of seeing people focusing on what "can't be done."
It's my first acquaintance with Grandma - and I love her! Must seek out more of her paintings too! Thank you.
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Old Time USA
Musical Inspiration from Grandma Moses Time
Peppy tunes to inspire you to get kickin'
| Track | Artist | Album | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rocky Top | Appalachian Pickers | Old Timey Country | |
| Early American Uptempo Medley | The Westminster Chorus | It Only Takes A Moment | |
| Lightnin' | Bluegrass Banjo | O Brother Banjos | |
| Down to the River to Pray | Alison Krauss | O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture) | |
| when the Sun Is On the Dew | allisun krauss | The Best of Allisun Krauss | |
| Hurricane of 1935 INSTRUMENTAL | Allisun Krauss | Jasmine Sand |
America in Bygone Times
Grandma pictured it affectionately
Thanksgiving was a holiday unique to American history. Few people now understand that a successful hunter and farmer meant the difference between surviving or not during the harsh conditions of Early America. In Grandma Moses time, they looked back sentimentally to rural plenty of a settled America. Celebrations were of that state of plenty.
This was perhaps the golden age of American agricultural communities and small towns. Horatio Alger stories, which found real life examples. For Grandma Moses, life was indeed a satisfying one, full of the fruits of "keeping busy", building a home, a family, and her business, whether it was selling apples, butter or artwork.
Art Links About Grandma Moses
- Painting on Tree Mushrooms
- "punk" paintings and what is tree mushroom painting .
Grandma's Artful Memory
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Seth Godin is one of the great minds in how we communicate today and how to apply that to business. He is actually more than that when you see how many of his observations about life and how things work make sense on more levels than just marketing and business. He inspires me.
Maybe he will inspire you.
