Crafting a Creative Christmas : A Bavarian Childhood Is Recalled in Wintry Memories Framed on Canvas

It’s boom time for many South Bay artists, especially crafts people and others whose works make good Christmas gifts or decorations.

Maudette M. Ball, executive director of the Palos Verdes Community Arts Assn., calls the holidays an “everybody wins” time: Artists get a market for their work, and buyers get “something that is made by the human hand.”

Times staff writer Gerald Faris takes a look at what some of those hands have been doing this holiday season.

Rita Schroeder plucks her winter and Christmas art themes from memories of her childhood in her native Bavaria.

“I cherish my Christmases,” she said. “They were quiet and mysterious, because we children didn’t see anything until Christmas Eve. We could not come down to see the room until the tree had been lit. It makes me feel good to remember things so fondly.”

The Torrance artist’s German memories have taken on an American look in her winter and Christmas paintings and decorated plates, which are about ice skating, Christmas trees, toys and 19th-Century buildings.

One winter snow scene is a slice of winter life right out of Kingston, N.Y., in Victorian times. “I use a lot of real buildings, and then I put in the scenes I want to,” she said.

Schroeder, who painted for her own enjoyment before selling her first work in 1970, uses a colorful, highly detailed primitivist style. She said she is entirely self-taught, adding, “My work is very spontaneous. If I took lessons, I might lose that.”

She had her first New York art show in 1974 after winning a Ladies Home Journal contest for artists painting in the style of Grandma Moses.

Schroeder works with oil enamel, a bright, durable medium that nonetheless is a challenge because it requires the artist to paint quickly: “It is hard to work with, gets gooey and is miserable to inhale.”

One of her paintings is of Christmas with children in front of a fire, with presents under a nearby tree. “It’s an old-fashioned, Victorian Christmas,” she said.

Another is of the night before Christmas, with children tucked under the quilted covers of a big bed, and a hobby horse and other toys strewn about.

Some of the winter and Christmas scenes Schroeder does find their way onto antique plates, which she collects and then paints. In one snow scene, children are shown walking across a great expanse of snow on their way to a church with the onion-dome steeples characteristic of Bavaria.

“My work is happy and joyful,” she said. “That’s what most people like about it.”