some type of adult girl

bogleech:

I only just found a couple photos of my grandmother and her house.

Virginia Franz died of lung cancer in 2003, and up to then had spent almost every day of her life painting or sculpting. She painted every genre, every category of subject matter, original things and replicas of famous works. She sculpted creepy masks and exaggerated female figures, she turned her bathroom wall into a life sized mural of a mermaid, she made all sorts of unusual stuffed animals and dolls, and she filled her house with thousands of little things that she liked.

A few years after she passed away, my mother moved from Maryland to Florida and had a majority of Virginia’s art loaded into a van (along with most of her own possessions).

The whole van was stolen out of a motel parking lot only miles from its starting point, and nothing in it was ever recovered…. except the painting of roses you see here, which somehow, against all possible odds, wound up for sale at a Goodwill a few miles from my mom’s new Florida home, seven years after the move.

I still have the last two paintings, since I never moved anywhere without them. The three-eyed monster was copied from a drawing I made when I was around three years old, and the blue figure is loosely inspired by the kinds of ancient carvings and artifacts people kept trying to spin as early alien visitors.

It’s likely the rest of her paintings and sculptures have been scattered all across America. She didn’t sign all of them, but many would be signed “V Franz.”

Whoever stole and unloaded all that stuff had to be a little confused by the big box of custom BDSM barbie dolls with tiny hand-made gimp masks. I doubt they could have guessed they were made by a grandmother in her 80’s.

(via witchchad-deactivated20160310)