“At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (portrait of Hoshin and Amelie)
Pencil, pastel, and watercolor
2021
NFS
One of the unexpected joys of this past year has been my introduction to and subsequent friendship with Hoshin, a single mother who’s raising (quite successfully) her four year old daughter with a degree of care and intention that’s astonishing to witness. She and Amelie actually live in this old inn, so I get to see them every day…..and doing so is nothing but a pure joy. Of course, one of the incidental pleasures of knowing Hoshin (she’s only about thirty) is that, as a former, quite successful child actor/model in New York, she can blithely rattle off tales of the business (which she deliberately left at age 18). I gather that all child actor/models know all the other child actor/models, since they’ve all spent thousands of hours, since they were five or so,, in auditions. I asked about Lindsay Lohan, and Hoshin casually replied “Oh, yeah….we all knew her. She was the one who always got the ‘little redheaded girl’ parts.” For various reasons, I find that response very amusing. In any case, this is to be a gift to Hoshin today. And just for the record, Hoshin is not raising her daughter to be an actress or a model; as far as I can tell, the girl’s being raised to be a princess.
