It’s shy of a year since Dahlov Ipcar passed at 99 in Brunswick, Maine… She was the author and amazing artist/illustrator of Hardscrabble Harvest, a children’s book about a young couple eking a hardscrabble existence in Maine. They raise animals and crops, can and preserve, live and love. It was the main inspiration for our name – HardScrabble Solutions.
In this 2013 profile by Susan Conley, Author with photos by Winky Lewis for Maine Magazine, we learn of Ipcar’s bohemian upbringing inGreenwich Village and humble adulthood in Maine.
William and Marguerite married in 1912 and raised Ipcar and her brother, Tessim, in Greenwich Village with an extended family of bohemian artists. Marguerite painted in the living room while William chiseled stone in the dining room. Ipcar leans back in an old Danish chair and sighs. “I was my parents’ great experiment. They wanted to see what would happen to me if they didn’t interfere. So they never pushed me around.”
She too worked with children underfoot and found a way to persist with her efforts in tact, much the way we try here.
There’s a kind of preternatural calmness about Ipcar in the way she talks and moves and thinks, a deliberateness and clarity. It doesn’t surprise me when she says it never mattered if her boys drove fire engines up her easel while she painted, or if the cousins from her brother’s place next door ran roughshod through the studio. She never fussed over the interruptions.
Read the full profile here: https://www.themainemag.com/people/2286-dahlov-ipcar/
