Honoring Kaye Nelson, 1936 - 2025

My mom, Kaye, passed away last week. After several years living with Alzheimers, she was finally set free. At some point, the end becomes a blessing. It doesn’t make it any easier, though - I feel like I never really got to say goodbye to the great woman I once knew. I am forever grateful for Dennis, her stalwart companion of almost twenty-five years. He loved her deeply, took wonderful care of her, and was unfailingly by her side.

Kaye grew up on a farm in Nebraska. It was there she harvested her wanderlust. Small-town living created a desire in her to explore the world. Taking a job with Braniff airlines, she got her chance. Through her work, she met my father and had me. For life’s next adventure, he wanted to go east. She wanted to go west. They bid each other adieux and San Francisco became my mom’s destination. With a packed bag and three-year old me tossed into her Austin Healey Bug-Eye Sprite, she took to the road toward the great Pacific Ocean. Every time I see one of those rare classic sports cars, I stick my head in and inhale that memory.

San Francisco became a dream come true. My sister Holly came into the world a few years later and the Sunset District was our home. From Braniff, Kaye went to National Airlines and then American. The city was shifting from mid-modern elegance to psychedelic hippie chic.

The cultural energy of this new vibrant city inspired her love of music, art, food and film.

We lived around the corner from the Surf theater which featured foreign cinema such as The Red Balloon. Restaurants like John’s Grill and the Cliff House amazed. Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park were just two blocks away. Live music, street artists, and soccer games were everywhere.

My mom built a community through her work with the airlines. The ticket office was in the St. Francis Hotel on the corner of Post and Powell. Across the street was Union Square which was a bustling downtown mecca with newspaper and flower kiosks at every turn. The St. Francis boasted many notable guests. Most notable to me, as a kid who loved anything and everything baseball, were visiting teams. When famous players came through for tickets, my mom was sure to get autographs for me. The signature of the likes of Bob Gibson, Roger Maris, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda - even locals like Willie Mays and Willie McCovey made my baseball memorabilia collection ever more valuable.

We were not far from the Legion of Honor and De Young museums. My mom enrolled me in art classes and made sure that I always had art supplies. Kaye found her own artistic passion in photography. Inspired by old masters such as Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier-Bresson, she set up a homemade darkroom in the basement of the Sunset cottage. Camera often in hand, the city became her muse.

The door to the basement opened up onto her other muse, a rose garden. This transplanted farm girl dedicated her back and side yards to a magical display of climbing roses and bushes filled with bursts of fantastic heirloom florals. Working the garden was her moving meditation and connected her to her roots.

The roses were abundant! As beautiful as they were, what was particularly impressive was that she was able to create this blooming paradise in sandy beach-adjacent soil. A single bud in a small vase in the front room would generously share its perfume throughout the house. When I moved back to SF from LA, I could not help but be enchanted by the roses. Eventually, my mom retired from the airlines, and with sea-faring Dennis by her side, she learned to sail in San Francisco Bay. Together, they decided to share an adventure on the 30-foot sloop, Lizzy Jean. South to Central America they sailed, and spent five years at sea - sailing, moored and adventuring the great Pacific.

On our first date, I brought Teresa rose from my mother’s garden - a fluffy and fragrant coral-colored heirloom rose. That gesture has become timeless in our story. And it was poetic that my mom’s sailing journey provided Teresa and me an opportunity to move into the beach house. There, we did our best to take care of that First Prize and twenty-some others, too. I’m a better painter than I am a gardener, so I honored my mother and her passion by creating two paintings of my favorite of her roses: Fragrant Cloud and First Prize. Both share a figurative, shapely flower and a captivating scent.

To honor the memory of my mother I’ve chosen to make these two rose paintings available to all lovers of roses, art and matriarchs. I do not offer prints very often and yet now feels especially appropriate for these roses to be shared with my collectors. They are artfully made as either a print on archival paper or on canvas. Adding a rose to your own art collection will also help defray costs associated with my mother’s memorial and interment.

Thank you for reading, and for holding a space for my beautiful mother in the garden of your heart.

Sincerely,

Jay