Gretchen Quie, Remembrance

Since I was born in 1980, my earliest memories of my Grandma Quie are, of course, at the Governor’s residence. This earliest memory includes intimations of what I would come to know of Grandma--she handed me a rag doll to clutch while I walked, over-awed among faceless legs and huge staircases. That doll was something that I could hold: a tactile, loving connection with something much too big for me to understand.

Each time my Grandma came out to visit our family, or we travelled to Minnesota, she would draw another line of connection for us.

She would take us on walks, with a large paper bag in hand. She would dig up mounds of moss, have us collect interesting looking sticks, leaves, berries, nut shells, stones, and put it all in the bag. She urged us to look for grapevine curls. We spent time prying up large rocks to look underneath, crawling under forsythia bushes, sifting through pine needles, picking raspberries, and standing in mud puddles to feel the mud between our toes. When we had collected enough items, we would traipse back to the house, and she would get down one of my mom’s largest pottery bowls or platters and put it in the middle of the table. She’d start to assemble a miniature world for us. Lumps of moss would became whole hillsides. A collection of twigs became a grove of trees. Tiny pebbles became a rocky shore for a lake. And finally she would find the little rough clay viking figures that my mom would never let us touch, and place them in that world, asking us what the vikings were doing or where the were going--starting a story. Because of her we began to see what had not been seen before.

Grandma encouraged my rock collecting when I was little. She would bring or send me rocks from all over the world as she travelled. Once, when she visited, she brought these little red dot stickers and a blank notebook, and showed me how I should write a corresponding number on the rock and in the notebook, then in the notebook write down what it was, where it was from, and any other notes about it. My drawers full of rocks became an orderly collection.

During each visit to Minnesota she would get down one of her amazingly organized boxes and let us look through it. We had no idea all that her life had contained, and each box was like opening a different treasure chest from her past. One contained an intricate shivering gold Chinese crown in a lucite box, one a napkin from a dinner where she had sat next to Dizzy Gillespie. She had notebooks that she had made lists in, and would let us read them: the grocery items, and their prices, that she and Grandpa had taken on their honeymoon camping trip… One sentence for each day for a year… The books that she had read…. A summary of the entire bible, one sentence for each chapter….  

As we grew up, the projects she would do with us changed too, but she always wanted us to see some way of engaging the world creatively.

Once, we were driving back from a trip to an art museum. We were tired and lolling in the back seat somewhat oblivious to our surroundings, and Grandma pulled the car over, jumped out and went to speak to two boys who were fishing on a dock. She talked them into selling her a Sunny, a tiny fish, wrapped in newspaper. When we returned home, she put aprons on us, had us dry off the fish while she got ink, a tray, and an ink roller out. She told us we were going to make block prints using the fish. I remember the sticky roughness of the fish scales and spines, the sharp smell of the ink, and noticing that thick rice paper swelled like a sponge when we pressed the fish onto it, before it dried. I think most projects would have ended at that point, but Grandma showed us that we needed to number our print, title it, and sign it in pencil. The title would be “Icthus”. She told us how early Christians used the icthus as a secret sign to communicate to others their belief. After the print dried, she matted it. She showed us both spontaneous creativity, and ordered, directed process.

Another time she had collected different types of birds’ feathers, carved the tips, and let us dip them onto wet japanese ink stones to try writing with them. In her backyard we found enormous puffball mushrooms, the size of volleyballs. She sliced one up and fried it in butter for us to try eating a bit.

Her whole life to me is “the outcome of passionate interest and ready experiment” (p.xxiv) directed by faith, to the glory of Jesus Christ.

Grandma had the ability to communicate and teach each of us through the experience of seeing and creating alongside her, preparing us to look at her own work and life as adults. Now, when I look at Grandma’s paintings, drawings, and prints, I have begun to be able to see the connections of line and form that she knew. I have begun to be able to see how color could be both representational and abstract at the same time, and made meaningful by repetition.

One of my favorite 20th century English artists, John Edgerton Piper wrote this about looking at a sculpture in a church. I think it fits Grandma’s work as well:

“The godlike thoughts of those that wrought--

These things we know are what we ought

To make our standard, and we see

That they did make things thoughtfully.

They wrote their own salvation down

By seeking God’s will, not their own.” (p.22)

Grandma recorded not just what she saw, as a journalist would, but her art was instead the product of her sensibility: connecting the experience of place, time, and circumstance. She engaged “readily with ideas and lived in the present, but a present thickened and challenged by awareness of the past.” (p.xxiv) And then she organized it. Into little drawers with labels on them.

I know each grandchild was able to experience Grandma’s great love for the lines and perspectives and connections in the world, either through her welcoming gentle love in her home, organized playfulness (teaching us different games), or by looking at her astonishingly varied creative output: from stained glass and ceramics to collage and paintings. She has shown us a world that is the reflection of God’s love, beauty, and creativity. For each of us, Grandma opened up new ways of seeing, and not just visually. Now, as a mother myself, I appreciate the challenge of her tireless work to create beauty daily for her family.

At this stage in my life, I now have a profound understanding of the gifts Grandma has given me… gifts that reside in me, and also in my children. Gifts that will be given even to their children, not born yet, because of how Grandma has influenced me. I am grateful to Grandma for drawing with me and making me touch dead fish. For making my life more layered, colorful, geometric, and open. I am grateful that God created in her such a willing and humble heart to be used by him.

I am grateful to God for his generational faithfulness, and I pray that God’s work in and use of Grandma’s life would continue to encourage us to live reflecting his beauty.

(The quotations are from Frances Spalding’s biography, John Piper and Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art).