Kathryn Hutton
Although my siblings and I had a rocky childhood in some ways, I send up a silent thanks to my mother Kathryn Hutton (wherever she may now be) for creating an early connection of art to life. As babies we dozed to Brahms and a little later toddled around to the dramatic score of Beethoven and Vivaldi. Our walls were covered with original art and bookshelves sagged under the weight of Renaissance and modern art tomes.
Mom was a professional free lance artist. My earliest memories place her in the studio, bespectacled and working intently on her latest greeting card creation. She was a fine artist, but to pay the bills Mom worked for Gibson. Somehow she managed to raise four children and maintain an art career through the decades it took to launch us into adulthood. Our father, a closet writer and visual artist himself, had a lesser impact during those same years. Mom was a burning inferno of emotion and creation, a parental presence difficult to compete with. Our father passed away in 1969, leaving some unpublished short stories and several paintings.
Mom encouraged us to create. She hated coloring books, insisting that we draw from our imaginations. We also sang when we were children; my brother Jeff had perfect pitch, triumphantly humming The Battlefield of the Republic at the age of three. My sister and I sang harmonies while we washed the dishes , belting out bawdy songs we’d learned from our favorite groups, The Chad Mitchell Trio and The Limeliters. And we wrote our own songs about the celebrities of the day. “Marilyn Monroe’s the Queen of the Screen” was our most notable.
An idyllic childhood? Far from it. But the artistic moments of my childhood offset the agonizing ones. Being raised by artists planted my feet firmly on a path of creativity, still my greatest joy. – Merry
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