Sustenance

This painting is titled:

SUSTENANCE

By Gawenase Johnson

The Eastern Woodland women labor in

Springtime fields. A sturgeon has been buried in

An earthen mound to serve as fertilizer for the seeds of the

“Three Sisters”: the corn, the beans and the squash.

These are the crops that will provide sustenance during the cold of winter.

I decided to share this image of my painting Sustenance because it relates to Praying Towne, in that it depicts Native life as it was in the 1600’s.

I apologize because I have not been painting lately. Someday in the future, I might get back to it. If my friend Jean has anything to do with it, I will. She is off to Arizona for the winter and maybe when she returns we will bring out the paints, but for now I’m devoting more time to writing. I’m hoping to be able to get the editing done soon.

I’m excited and a bit apprehensive about getting Praying Towne out there. I wish everything in the book was built from substantiated facts. That would be impossible to accomplish. There is no proof that my ladies, Damaris and Amie, actually were such close friends. I almost didn’t write the book. Then I decided what better way to bring such intriguing history to life than through a lifelong friendship of two women who lived in that day and time. Fiction or no, I had to go with it.

My research brought to light so many actual facts such as: the first book ever printed in America was the Holy Bible in the Algonquin language. Now if that isn’t a huge, amazing curiosity. Of course I had to dig into the how and why such an unusual thing came to happen. Who were they and what would cause them to take on such an undertaking?