Fishing with Dad

A father and his son sit in a small wooden rowboat among the cattails, each with a rod out over water full of fish. The father wears a hat and a red jacket patched at the elbow. The boy, in overalls, holds his line the way he has watched it done.

The style is American folk art: flat color, plain faces, no worry about perspective. The border does as much work as the scene. Its corners are blocks of stars and triangles of the kind pieced into patchwork quilts, and the strips between them carry tulips, hearts and leafy sprigs, the vocabulary of Pennsylvania German decorated chests and birth certificates. Those motifs lived on household objects long before anyone hung them as pictures.

Setting a fishing trip inside a quilt border makes a small point. A patched jacket and a pieced quilt come from the same habit of making things last and handing them down, and so does the way a boy learns to fish.

Fish in rust, gold and grey-green turn in the teal water below the boat. A lure dangles from the father's line, birds cross a cream sky, and red, blue and cream blocks run around all four edges.