In June of 2005, Mom and I went around her house, photographing the paintings on her wall. Below are some of the ones her father did. Sometimes Mom talked about the paintings themselves, and sometimes they reminded her of stories.

Erich Alfred Martin Ideler, or "Tin" to his friends, studied art in the 19 teens with Mewes. After traumatic service in World War I (see photo at right), he painted backdrops for movies, and then became instrumental in the art in public schools program in Berlin. He taught art in high school, but because he did not join the Nazis he remained at that level until after the war, when he became the Director of the Art Academy in Berlin. Later he was Dean of the art department at the University of Hamburg. He joined his daughers in Los Angeles with his wife Lonni after retirement, and died there in 1967.

He took a field trip with Mewes, his art teacher, and painted Danish landscapes.

My mother was exhausted, there was not enough food and she had a toddler and she was pregnant with me.

Martin went to Rügen and these Baltic areas. Back then, you didn’t have highways, so this is probably of a railroad track painted from a bridge. Back there, the blue triangle might be water. This is in the German Expressionist style, which he did at that time.

This was one of many canvases that my parents rolled up when they left Hamburg, and had it shipped in a crate to Los Angeles. I just stapled it to a cardboard.

Martin visited his former student, Arnold Haase in Paris (portrait by Mom in New York City 28 years later when Arnold sponsered her immigration to the US). Arnold was a representative of the German radio system and was about 19 or so. They went into the countryside from Paris. My dad loved France and it was pretty there, and they went and walked around and sketched.

I remember there were also quite a few sketches of nude models in art studios, they did that too. Arnold said, “Well, there are possibilities for some French sexual experiences,” and my father said, “No thanks, I’m faithful to my wife, and that’s it.” In those days, they had syphilis instead of AIDS.

This looks like it also was at the time of the apple blossoms. Martin was a Francophile and went to France every chance he could get, and usually stayed with Arnold just acorss the street from the Louvre. The street that's in The Da Vinci Code. He and Mutti went to Paris from Hamburg after the war, and later on, when he was in America even, he went to Paris. He had to speak really good French because they hate the Germans over there.

Of course, my grandmother Luise Mayet was bilingual because her mother was French. Mutti could speak French too.

This could be a scene from one of our summer vacations.

My parents made a statement with the wild colors they used in that Victorian house. Where the orange of the tablecloth stops, if you would carry it through, it would destroy the composition of the painting. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t know what to do next. He wasn’t really a good portraitist so he didn’t do much with her face, he just thought it was an amazing burst of color at the dining room table. The big sofa she’s sitting on they bought at an estate sale, and reupholstered it. Under the table, this black, that was not right either, doesn’t make sense coloristically or logically. He had to fix it to finish the painting. That’s the thing about being an artist. You sell most of your good paintings and then you are left with the ones that didn’t quite work.

Down into the cellar is where the goat lived. The little garden was Vati’s, usually with iris in it. The stairs up went to the main house.

These were from a French bakery in downtown Berlin. He bought them and took them home and before we got to eat them, he did a painting. And the apples were from our garden. This painting always hung in our kitchen.

This shows the old houses of people who were fishermen at the Baltic Sea. They rented out a room or two to summer visitors while they lived above the stables someplace. We spent almost every summer in one of these little places. You got a choice of places to reserve in January, usually. We were together with a group of painter friends, and made reservations for four weeks or so.

Many of these coastal areas have a little strip of land and then a bracken lake called bodden behind the ocean, fed by rivers and the tide. People had their villages there instead of right by the ocean because the weather was a little milder.

It was a rainy day at the Baltic Sea and nobody could go out and paint so I had to sit still in the enclosed verandah for this portrait. You can see the blanket on my lap.

The first painting on the left is by Franz Stock.

The one on the right is by Gretl Stock. She made me look cute.

The one on the bottom left is by my father. He was interested in the reflected colors on the wall. He's not trying to be realistic, but to explore color and form.

I remember that yellow jacket that Mutti had.

You can see that this was painted on top of a red underpainting. It was in his studio, and in the background you can see his painting smock and a curtain hanging in front of his bookshelf.

This was a sour cherry tree. When we came back from vacation, the sour cherries were just ripe, and since the tree was quite dainty, we could reach all the berries.

He didn’t smoke a pipe, only cigarettes. It was just hanging around amongst his props for paintings. The lower part of the bowl shows what he was trying to do, all the different ways that whites reflect with each other.

When my parents first came to America, they lived in Hollywood in an apartment of Adeline Welton's house, on Elmwood between Western and Van Ness.

Adeline was a cousin of Martin, a redhead and a very vivacious full-blooded woman. She had married a very handsome man who had been a tailor, Jay Welton. As soon as he married this daughter of a millionaire, he turned into a gentleman. They couldn’t have any children so they adopted a boy, a nice boy but he wasn’t clever or talented or anything like that. He married and had children and I lost track.

Adeline took my parents on trips, she liked to make trips. She took them to Santa Barbara and north of there for a few days, and to the desert, and so forth. They had a really good time together.

In Germany, my father had a good position and was paid well. What he got in the way of pension money was very meager in American money, but they managed very well with it. We bought them second-hand furniture and all that. We were just starting, too, but all in all, it was okay. It was the new world with new possibilities. Vati was a little lonely, artistically. In Hamburg, he had this circle of interesting and famous friends. Here in America, Adeline would say, “Oh, isn’t that nice,” and that was it. So every once in a while, he wanted to talk art with me and I would get to bed at three in the morning, and at six my three little ones would wake up.

In Los Angeles they had their outings, and Mutti was almost every day at my house and played with her grandchildren. She was blissfully happy with the little children. Mutti sketched the children and always said stuff like, “Can I hang up the diapers?” and I would say, “No, Mom, you are not a housewife. You can play with the children.” My children learned how to play with balls, and got walks around the block, and went to the store with her.

Then she got sick. I think what she had was MS, but it was not recognized as such. Her daughter Suzanne and Jim took them over, and built a little addition to their house, which we helped pay for. They lived there for a year or two and then my mother had to be put into a hospital because my father couldn’t take care of her. She was so paralyzed that he couldn’t handle her. She had to go to this hospital, which was in the neighborhood, and Suzanne visited every day. Then my father died. Then my mother didn’t eat any more and died too.

This was from the balcony of Adeline Welton’s place, on Elmwood between Western and Van Ness in Hollywood. In the sky you can see textures, so probably this was painted on top of another painting.

This was from the balcony of Adeline Welton’s place, on Elmwood between Western and Van Ness in Hollywood. In the sky you can see textures, so probably this was painted on top of another painting.

After we married, Fred and I moved to a little house in Silver Lake. We had that for a year until we bought the house on Serrano.

He really didn’t like mountains that much because he got carsick getting there.

Canna lilies were so exotic and so Southern California that he fell in love with them. This is in his studio, you can see the canvases. As an impressionist, he can vary the color of the white against the color of the orange blossoms so beautifully, and the dark foliage of the flowers.

I hung this in Fred's office because it makes a real masculine statement; the beauty of the blossoming plant, and yet something strong and positive.