Arty Farty Friday ~ Re-viewing Sun Virgoan Grandma Moses

Today's post was hauled up from the dusty 2007 archives:

The birthday of one of the USA's national treasures - the artist known as Grandma Moses, would have been this week:
7 September, in 1860. She's seen here with Norman Rockwell, circa 1949.

Extract below from here [regret website is no longer available in 2016].
Astrological comments, in red, related to natal chart, are mine. Wikipedia's page.

"Anna Robertson, later to become "Grandma" Moses was born on September 7, 1860 in upstate New York. She didn't marry until she was twenty seven, but still bore ten children. Only five of those lived to adulthood. When her husband was alive they lived in Virginia, but after his death in 1927 she moved back to New York. People who knew her say she was feisty and strong willed.(Mars in Capricorn on the ascendant) A necessary trait, no doubt, in the Depression years.

She started painting at age 75, after arthritis prevented her from doing needlework. Her work was discovered by a collector during the Depression.

Grandma Moses's work was known as American Primitive in the art world. (She said that primitive is what they call amateur art that sells). She painted her scenes on pieces of old wood which she painted white. Her paintings are simple in texture, but complex in content
(Virgoan eye for detail). She depicted happy scenes from real life, much as she might have stitched them on canvas before her arthritis took hold. She said she painted from the sky down. Sky first, then the mountains, then the land, then the people. Her people were shown doing anything she might have seen someone do in her long, active life, and were rich in color.

Between the start of her painting career at age seventy-five and her death at age one hundred and one in 1961, Grandma Moses painted approximately sixteen hundred paintings.
Some two hundred and fifty of those were painted after her hundredth birthday!(Moon/Uranus in Gemini - youthful and energetic outlook.) Some say her family never took her paintings seriously, but the art world certainly did."

Two quotes from Grandma Moses

"Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be". (Amen!)
"Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.'(Saturn conjunct Mercury, Mars in Capricorn on ascendant)

You have only to look at the paintings of Grandma Moses (explore them via Google Image)to know that Earth will be the predominant element in her natal chart. 5 planets and ascendant in Earth, 2 each in Air and Fire, one in Water.