Not being much of an artist myself, I can’t find it within my heart to fault the artist ability in this drawing. Undoubtedly, mine would have turned out much worse. I wonder about the story behind this particularly diagram. At first glance, it’s a pretty straightforward drawing of a house with pretty standard labels. Then, you start to notice things like “cushion walls”, “dead-bolted door” and “barred windows”. I’m curious as to the choice to make some of the labels reflect an insane asylum or something scarier and some are just typical house things. Why not turn the attic into a more ominous space? Perhaps under the steps is a crawlspace for hiding bodies. Maybe the cement sidewalk is actually a garage full of freezers where dead bodies are kept. The choices people make are always interesting. Where one person would look at this drawing and see just a regular house, someone else might look at it and see something entirely different. Maybe someone else would be reminded of the house where they grew up. This house could be reminiscent of an idyllic and happy childhood or it could bring back memories of abuse, sadness, a parent losing their job. To me, this looks like one of the houses in the Russian bottoms. Who knows what kinds of hardships those immigrants survived—or didn’t survive. In the first few years after the German-Russian immigrants after they built their houses, there was flooding in the area, driving people from their homes and undoubtedly causing property damage. What interesting stories those houses could tell.
