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To help me select the participants in this book, I turned to the members of the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center, with whom I had been long associated. The Center put out a call to their members for nominations for the book and received over fifty marvelous nominees. From this group the SDPJC Board of Directors helped me edit the list to the fifteen elders who were invited to participate.

From January of 1995 through the early summer I traveled the region interviewing and photographing the elders. It is impossible to express in written form the depth of the experiences. The landscapes, the communities, the homes, the families, the kindness and hospitality of the elders were learning experiences on many levels. I used a standard set of questions in the interviews though occasionally I omitted one or more.

The written product from the interview was a distillation of hours of conversation that many times meandered into multiple interesting directions. My first drafts of the interviews were edited by the former director of SDPJC, Legia Spicer. Her guidance greatly improved the written component. The interviews were lastly reviewed by the elders themselves, making certain I was correctly reflecting their thoughts.

The portraits were painted in the summer of 1995 using photos and notes from the interview sessions as sources. I would many times combine various aspects of different photos of an elder to create an image I felt better reflected the character I wished to convey. The portraits are not meant to be a photographic likeness of the elder. Had I wished that effect I would have used photographs. Instead I wanted to use the emphasis of texture, color, and line that is part of my painting technique to create an interpretation of the elder. I found painting the portraits just as rewarding an experience as the interviews. My subjects had a tremendous variety of facial qualities enhanced by the details of the many decades of living. The cloud pattern in the background of each portrait is based on the sky the day of the interview.

Doing these portraits led me to contemplate what I would call the “aesthetics of age.” We live in a society that puts prime value on youth and the visual beauty of youth. The desirability of youth is constantly marketed to us in obvious and subtle ways. It has been said that if an American has just turned fifty years old and mentions it to a friend, the friend may well respond, “You don’t look a day over forty!” In traditional China, in the same situation, when the Chinese mentions turning fifty the friend might respond, “Oh, you look at least sixty!” Both friends are attempting to be kind but in traditional China it is positive to look old.

I believe there is an aesthetic – a type of beauty – to aging. The study involved in doing these portraits certainly helped to reinforce this belief. As we age we physically change. It is a natural process: lines deepen, hair color changes, sometimes even eye color and skin color change, shapes and forms change. These changes reflect not the tight, smooth beauty of youth, but another kind of beauty of texture and line. They are a beauty reflecting time, a beauty reflecting character, and can be a beauty of reflecting wisdom. I hope my portraits convey some of that aesthetic.

As I look on this project with its diverse and thoughtful faces and words, I feel fortunate to have had the experience. I also think of the thirty-five nominees who were not interviewed and painted. I also think of elders who are all around us – in the grocery store, at the movie, walking on the street, at the doctor’s office, in our immediate families. There is so much to be learned from our elders in religious matters and all aspects of life. We simply need a small amount of wisdom ourselves to have the sense to ask them.

Mark W. McGinnis 1995

Note: On the publication of the eBook version in 2011, many of the elders in this book have passed on, leaving us the goodness of their lives including their words in this book.