RSW's Diary Comments

• Woodward did not keep records of the pastels he called "chalk drawings."

RSW sitting in his 1936' Packard with Ethel
standing to the left, with a young Dr. Mark leaning
in on the right. Ethel was the Smith Coll. roommate
of Julie Bourland of Peoria, IL. She visited Peoria in
1905 and that is went she first met Woodward!

It would not be for another 20 years till their paths
would cross again and would become fast friends.

This is a chalk drawing which Mr. Woodward made especially for his close friend Ethel Dow. It was very unusual for him to make a window picture in the chalk medium. The only other known to exist is North Window, which he gave to another close friend F. Earl Williams. Ethel had had her chalk for only a few years when she noticed that there was mold on its surface. RSW asked her to return it to the studio where he took it out of its glass frame and spent meticulous hours using dry paint brushes to remove all of the spots of mold. Then he touched up the chalk in places where it had been compromised. He commented that this process had consumed much more time than it took for him to make the original drawing.

This was the first instance of RSW knowing about mold developing in some of his chalk drawings. He tracked it down to a brown pigment in the chalk he had been using, threw out his entire supply, and purchased from a different manufacturer a different brown chalk. Thereafter, he had no complaints from people who bought chalk drawings, but there were several buyers of his early chalks of that era which did develop the mold. He made each of these right.

Today it is noticed on the above chalk, under high resolution, that mold has recurred rather extensively. If RSW were still living he would be very disappointed and discouraged. But he would again make it right by either fixing it or drawing a new chalk not, of course, using the same old brown chalk which caused the original difficulty.

MLP