DEATH OF PAINTING

DEATH OF PAINTING

1.

 

I was in my studio one morning when my father called to tell me that he was in the ER, could I come? When I arrived, they had him in the emergency intake area near the ambulance entrance. I was led to a cold room partitioned by curtains hung on curving metal tracks. My father lay propped in a bed, dressed in a hospital gown and hooked up to monitors. His cheeks were pink, despite his general pallor. He smiled and greeted me weakly, and explained he’d been dizzy and struggled to stand without collapsing. But he felt a little better now that he’d rested. Attendants had been buzzing around, awaiting test results. A doctor strode in and asked my father a series of brusque questions before seeming to notice me.

You’re the daughter?

I nodded. Eve Haley, daughter of Eugene Haley.

Dad looked up at me from his bed like a little boy caught doing something naughty.

In the adjacent space, paramedics wheeled in a new patient. Through the partially drawn curtain I caught a flash of his appearance and half of his hospital bed and the movements of his legs under the blankets. He was a very large man. His answers to the paramedics’ questions and their familiarity indicated that he had been in the ER recently, repeatedly, and that his condition and habits—smoking, drinking, eating poorly—had not improved. Wheezy and chatty, this half-curtained man described his sedentary lifestyle in intricate detail. A doctor finally tugged the partition closed.

The cavernous space seemed a kind of temporary parking garage for patients in wheeled beds, where a pit crew of medics performed hasty diagnostics and a few realignments and rolled them back out for another lap.

 

Seeing that I would not lose another parent in short order, the grim effects of my adrenaline subsided. I settled my gaze on the curtain separating the two men’s emergencies. All at once, I felt as if I understood the true subject of my last paintings. The thinning veil, the curtain barely separating life from death.

Without knowing at the time quite what I was doing, I’d bought some second-hand patterned sheets and tacked them over my studio windows. I made sixteen paintings in total, each one four feet wide by eight feet tall, each depicting a bedsheet hung up by its corners and backlit against a window. I called the series Loved Ones.

The paintings had been a moderate success. I’d sent them rolled up in cardboard tubes to a gallery in Los Angeles, where they were flattened out and put in big expensive frames. The gallerist included the cost of the frames in the sale prices, so I’d have to sell half the show in order to recoup my expenses. One painting sold to a small museum, one to a film director, another to an actress who I was told entertained a lot of art-loving friends.  

Standing at close range, a viewer would be able to tell that these were not quantities of fabric draped on a gallery wall, but thick paper hand-painted with patterns and textures. I had chosen the sheets for their nostalgic qualities. There were Star Wars motifs, paisley patterns and grandmotherly-looking cabbage roses, the kinds of patterns you remembered from childhood. I was interested in what got lodged in memory. Frightened children holding vigil on werewolf nights, tracing the patterns in the dark. The sheets dorm-bound college students stuffed in duffels, and used later as drop cloths on the scratched hardwood floors of a barely-afforded fixer-upper. Sheets mismatched and threadbare with age, consigned to the back closet. Now shared with a spouse. Now tangled with a lover.

 

What had Eugene thought of the paintings? I couldn’t remember him commenting. Nomi had been the one to marvel, to ask questions and tell stories, root out the depths. Eugene seemed content merely to have equipped two daughters and a son for going along to get along. When he expressed appreciation, it was entirely non-specific. Well, that’s pretty. Gosh, would you look at that. The chip on my shoulder, the thorn in my side, was his undiscerning acknowledgment, my receipt for a meal cooked with artistry and intention, a belch.

It hurt that he did not know me. I thought of myself as a kind of butterfly flashing my marvelous wings, but I could not seem to interest or enchant or him. It was intolerable to always be speaking grandly to someone who wasn’t listening. Eugene was a blank. I decided my father was banal. Oh, too harsh. The man loved us and didn’t leave. I should be so lucky. And grateful: he unlocked my ambition. I would be excellent, and I would encode my artwork with hidden messages for an attentive viewer to decipher.

So, I developed and still indulge a somewhat childish habit of imagining peoples’ reactions.

You, the viewer, are in a bit of a hurry, but you pause and take stock. Your observations drop into familiar registers. Patterns and textures, fool the eye. Crafty, but nothing new. No further reward for your sustained attention.

Good grief, imagine the boredom. Painting every single petal and leaf? How tedious. Clearly someone with a lot of time on her hands. How luxurious.

There’s a decidedly paint-by-number quality to all this, you rightly note, like those pre-printed kits sold in kitsch stores. As finished products they are in poor taste. To paint by number, you sequentially fill in the irregular shapes corresponding to one of eight or ten different numbered colors, browns, oranges, greens. As you fill in the shapes, the image printed on the box begins to appear. Say, a striped cat with green eyes. You decide to play a game and omit color #8. Now there are blanks everywhere. The illusion is incomplete. You can see the thin blue line between shapes, between order and chaos. You can see the guts. It’s startling enough to feel like reality—your impression of a seamless and integrated reality is interrupted and things start to get wobbly. What’s going on here? But you’ve seen blanks before, think children with cancer.

But here, consolation. Art! What could be more comforting? Easy on the eyes. A relief from the horror of blankness and gaps.

 

In a Sunday review, one art critic dismissed the paintings as the artist showing off a technical prowess for surface unmatched by conceptual depth. Despite his general support of her career, he seemed embarrassed on the artist’s behalf for missing the mark this time, for lavishing resource on work so unworthy of contemplation.

But look at the artist crabbed in a corner of her studio, calculating the hours it will take to complete each cluster of cabbage roses, wincing because the rate per hour against total sales shows her badly losing money. She can’t hide her desperation to finish and get paid. But she’s stubborn. She’s got checklists and timelines taped to the wall. She has created efficiencies, pre-mixing different hues of paint in forty-seven different jars. The wrist cramps nightly, but she submerges her arm to the elbow in a bucket of ice water and wraps it in twisted t-shirts. She won’t rush. There is nowhere to conceal a shortcut. The patterns simply must repeat until each motif is complete. The artist tallied the hours not spent with loved ones. These were harsh paintings. Faustian bargains. Did you know, she painted these while her mother was dying. Time was on her hands.

 

The doctor finally returned with a printout and reported that there were no indications of stroke. Eugene’s faintness was most likely due to weak blood pressure and dehydration, mild ischemia.

Can you list all your medications, Eugene?

My inhaler. Uh, Celebrex, Crestor. Viagra.

I glanced sharply at my father, then shifted my eyes to the doctor.

Get him to drink more fluids, he instructed me.

Eugene laughed. Can it be beer?

The doctor chuckled and I made my face impassive.

At least someone has a sense of humor, Eugene said.

I was grateful for the doctor’s professional demeanor and relieved that my father was by all appearances fine, and already making light of it.

2.

 Job, as I have begun calling you, after the biblical figure—since you are both upstanding and similarly beset with worries—this time, you really have outdone yourself. Your colors may have faded! A masterstroke. What’s the body count, now? Among your many talents, you are especially skilled at writing obituaries. I continue to receive your eulogies with relish, and collect them like love letters. As an aside, I noted your swipe at a sylvan America, and I expect that epitaph, whenever you are inspired to write it, will be your finest yet.

Of course you know the story of Job, a prosperous and blameless man whom God allowed the devil to provoke by utterly ruining his life. Job lost ten children, his health and all his wealth. He doubted but did not denounce God, and when his trials were over, God restored twofold everything taken from him.

 

These pink tulips leaning from their vase on my desk look like ears. I’ve taken to sitting in my studio in the half-light, a specious dusk conducive to brooding. The window blinds are drawn and a space heater is warming my shins. Spring hasn’t yet arrived, and tulips in February are false prophets. Deprived of natural light, their stems arc haphazardly to half-open cups, eavesdropping.

At one time, you and I had a productive dialogue. You saw my paintings and invested your belief in my vision of the world. I think you imagined me as some kind of sage. I thought this made me responsible for you. You were suffering, eaten alive by unshared secrets.

You must create, I said, my answer to everything. You must write.

To whom, you asked.

To yourself. In a journal or diary. Just notes, or quotes.

You had nothing to say to the void.

To me, then. Write to me. You and I have known each other nearly two decades. What can I offer in exchange for your attention? See, I’m dangling the bait. Here I wait, quietly in the dark for you to sneak up and reveal yourself. Do you remember how we met? I sold you a pencil. I followed you from the art shop for several blocks without a plan. With that pencil, you wrote me a letter. In the following years, sometimes you wrote often. Sometimes I barely replied. Yet we always encountered one another with curiosity, caution and excitement, which you likened to the first meeting of a human and an alien.

 

In one letter, you asked me about painting. How does someone become a painter?

When I was learning to paint, I didn’t understand what abstraction meant. You must abstract from something, my painting teacher told me. We were sitting on a bench in the hallway of the art building, and he was studying my painting of a tree.

Go look at Mondrian, my teacher said. You can see his thinking. He starts with this tree. It looks realistic. He painted hundreds of trees. Then all the lines begin breaking down. Why? He’s after a visual language. He’s not painting a tree, he’s painting the patterns and forces that shape nature and experience. And on and on and on, until he paints Broadway Boogie Woogie.

So, I said, abstraction is a kind of painting the way botany is a kind of science.

Don’t think about categories, my teacher replied. Think about representing something. Think about how what you are painting is not what the painting is about.

From then on, painting was a game. Everything I saw, I imagined how it could be painted. The game was to create an illusion, to camouflage everything. But people seemed upset or angry about painting. I tried to conceal that I was painting. I’d write a lot of words about what I was painting, then crumple them up. I made sculptures about painting, and paintings about hiding that I was painting.

My first gallerist saw one of my paintings hanging in a show and called me at work. He didn’t start out selling paintings. He was an expert in early photography. He had a quiet, confident way that inspired trust in collectors. In college he studied philosophy but switched majors and earned his degree in religious studies because, he said, he wanted to follow the progression of the world’s most important ideas. He thought religion was the more consequential, because it was built on faith and skepticism and it shaped how people behaved in the world.

He said my paintings had juice.

 

Years passed. You were building cineplexes and parking garages and living for the weekend. We moved to different cities and met infrequently. In one letter, you included a photo of me with my mother at my last exhibition, Loved Ones. I’m dressed in white. Nomi, smiling and leaning into me, was much shorter than I remembered, her spine compacted by the treatments.

You wrote: your love for your mother, her passing, and your paintings just melt me inside. This is what I call a picture that crumples me. Dents the soda can. Thinking about my first letter to you still makes me crack a smile and brings back the savory depth of those feelings. I’d give a kidney to have that feeling again. Tie me to the mast. Been waiting years for the juice to run down my cheeks.

Of course I was concerned! I called immediately. A motorcycle accident, it turned out to be. You had withdrawn, you said. There was little going for you aside from crashing ocean views and a motorcycle to bring you seaside. You weren’t in the habit of restraining your speed, as I rightly suspected. Finally can wipe me arse again, you said, the wrists aren’t holding me back anymore. Took the full three months to recover, though.

 

Job, we believe in humanity differently and encounter ourselves differently. Your relationships are often complex and disappointing, but you are sensitive to being exploited and mistreated. I do have feelings, you have said. You do not appreciate being jokingly treated as if you don’t.

You said your greatest aspiration now was to craft an encyclopedia of your worldview, influenced by all you have read and seen. Why, Job? What will this accomplish? In expressing my doubts about your project, perhaps I ruined your impression of my blank receptivity, which has always qualified me to harbor your troubled tankers of thoughts. Is it possible I antagonized one of your foundational views? Prodded a sacred cow?

For one thing, your ceaseless lamentation over the loss of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle makes it hard to have this conversation.

Look at what we do to the world, Eve. Easter Island, Eve. The Aztecs. Violence and art are inextricable. When there’s plenty, we make babies, art and war.

It’s a dead rebuke, I countered. The human animal seeks relentlessly to optimize and solve. You’ve said so yourself. However ill-starred, the forward march is inevitable. Now, seeing as we’re both childless, consider that we have done our parts. Without the mandates of mothering, I must embark on other quests. I suggest you do the same.

We argued. You said meaning ought to exist in the world, I said it must be created.

Community, you suggested.

Which is created, I said.

I rarely make points, as you know. I distrust certainty, preferring to entertain paradoxes. Your sensitivity has always convicted me. But your usual discomfort had brimmed to overflow. Pained by the world’s witless suffering, you were filled with involuted guilt. As you once wrote during an upheaval in my life, the paradigms are changing, guarantees revoked, and realities questioned. You listed the reasons to abandon hope. Time to shrug off this mortal coil.

Shuffle.

What?

Not shrug, shuffle. Hamlet.

Humanity is dead, Eve.

Not yet. Not yet! There are patterns of a different scale, I suggested, atomic and cosmic. There are stochastic mechanisms affecting outcomes in ways we could never predict.

How romantic, you jeered.

But it’s you who is romantic, shimmying into dead ideologies, admiring them in the half-light. It’s your worst quality. You direct your fantastic abilities at lesser projects.

Self-destruction is a large part of who I am, you replied.

You have no lodestar.

Exactly, you said, and fell silent.

Maybe you prefer silence. People who have been treated to silence become painters, left alone to grapple with it and shape it. I wondered if you had killed yourself. Don’t laugh. That was me being romantic. I thought I could give you something to live for. I’d only hoped to help.

 

This will help. Let me tell you something. If I tell you, will you stick around?

My teachers taught me everything about painting before they told me it was over. It dawned on me gradually and it was indescribably sad. How could it be? To have journeyed toward a distant light, to knock at a gate expecting warmth and welcome and to discover an empty ruin, long abandoned. I felt like the last to know.

The more I learned about painting, the clearer it became that it had died a few times already, before I was born. Some people thought it wasn’t up to its task. Some thought it would be crushed by the weight of its own history. The question of what it was, or could be, was settled and its job was done.

Someone I read, someone smart, put it like this.

All the art in the world now is like the oil in oil reserves. For millennia, this organic material was compressed and hidden, until the era dawned when people learned what it was and what to do with it. We grew and expanded until we used up all the oil in a very short span of time. The art ideas got used up in the same way. Now, there are no new ideas.

How did this happen?

Artists were curious. They grew restless with the ways they knew to represent reality. They proposed that reality does not exist, it’s constructed. So, the reality of “tree” must include Mondrian’s paintings of a tree. And the reality of a tree must also include what is not tree. Also, all the truths and lies about trees and not trees. All these constructions accumulated and became a part of reality.

This happened everywhere, in all areas, not just art. Basic relationships shifted. Things started to get messy, because people got confused about which layer of reality anyone was talking about, and the layers didn’t stay lofted and separate like French pastry, but mingled and compressed like crude oil. One French philosopher called this state of affairs hyperreality, probably while eating a croissant. A useful and powerful substance, hyperreality. We could render it for all kinds of purposes. What was life ever like before it?

We’d forgotten. We woke up one day and suddenly, everything was so abstract. We discovered that all we had were representations without origin, a bunch of lines and no tree. People wandered around rubbing bark and leaves between their fingertips, half-remembering trees but pretty sure these weren’t it.

 

So, we have to start again, Job, is what I’m saying. But who wants to go back to the beginning? Who wants to start over? For now we’re stuck sifting through time, searching for what we might have missed.

 

Listen, I’m going somewhere.

Around the time of your accident, I understood the woman in my dreams to be my mother. Different nights, she was different people. In one dream she was very angry at me. In another, she was a high-powered attorney with spiked hair, and said she’d never loved me. In another she was young, beautiful and flirtatious. Sometimes she was healthy but most of the time she was sick and about to die. The dreams bothered me because they suggested that I did not know who she was. Or, that she did not know who she was.

My sister Cassie asked Eugene to make changes to the obituary after his first draft. Dogcatcher? Nomi worked for a veterinarian briefly in her early twenties, or so I thought. Dogcatcher. These would be the words that netted our mother’s life. Soul and gentle were Cassie’s words. I know for a fact, she told our father, Mom didn’t like the word homemaker. My mother and father were married nearly fifty years. He had forgotten artist.

Nomi taught me how to draw faces and hands. She had learned this as a schoolgirl by staring at pictures of the Holy Virgin during catechism. There is no doubt, a famous art critic once said, that to become a really good painter, one must be catholic in the study of other painters. 

 

After Nomi died, everything was blasted flat. It was as if I had wandered backstage and spied the braces propping up the theater flats. Huge, black, cartoon Xs seemed to appear everywhere I looked, barricading me from the rest of human enterprise. All hopeful absorption, all pleasures and paths converged on a meaningless horizon. It was full summer in my neighborhood. The gardeners clipped their hedges, the delphiniums grew blue and high. What could be the purpose of fastidious lawn care? Pottery, peonies, motorcycle maintenance. What relentlessly trivial pursuits. I am speaking of attention. I had none. My brain swiveled wildly; without the ability to focus I grew impulsive, adjusting and readjusting the chair or rug, distracted by a strand of hair on the floor. My déjà vu returned.

Describing these sensations to my computer search bar—dizziness and nausea, strange dreamlike images, rushes of emotion and pulsing colors—the results suggested focal seizures. Unserious, but uncanny. I once had to steady myself against a light pole. It felt as if a great bulge was moving through me, snakelike. I envisioned three old women sitting on an apple-green couch, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. Then came an impression of brisk certainty: I’d experienced this exact moment before. I tasted broken teeth, memento mori of a childhood orthodontic procedure to extract two impacted molars.

There were different theories. The phenomenon probably related to memory and could be triggered by stress. I learned to close my eyes, keep still, let it pass. But what a marvel, to perceive the workings of my own brain. How might Cassie illustrate this, I wondered, how might she make it relatable, make it funny. I pictured a cartoon explosion coming from the top of my head, my limp stick figure slumped in a corner, eyes bleary swirls and ears steaming squiggles.

 

Recently, Cassie sent me a nature video of a chameleon lying on its side in the dirt. The caption read that this has never been filmed before. As it dies, the chameleon’s skin bursts into undulating colors. I watched it over and over. Its appealing, the thought that a dying moment is a blaze of expression, everything all at once.

I’m speaking to you now as one speaks to the wind or the waves. In confidence, not expecting a reply. I thought of what you said about the human project and began to see it more your way. I began to see virtue in your withdrawal. Say we start over. What comes after? After Job survived his ordeal? He had ten more children, but imagine, how he’s haunted by the first ten. How he repeats their names, listens for their voices, how he loved them.

Job, I am not a sage.

I was a painter. But now, I am unable to paint. My feeling for it left and never returned, and the void has filled with words. I want to paint again, but I don’t know how. How do you make paintings with too many words and no trees?

I am asking you.