25 years ago I wrote an article for Radix Magazine, a journal on Christianity and culture. The article is an interesting look into my process so long ago when my children were small and I was wrestling with family of origin issues through my painting. It is also a very transparent look at my spirituality at the time. Many aspects of my process and my art as therapy have changed and evolved since then, but this is an interesting record of my early days as an artist. My apologies for the photos--they're scans of old slides.
My Canvas Family
As I paint in my studio behind my house, I can
hear my children, ages two and four, inside with their father or their Russian
babysitter. When they were tiny, I craved a chance to paint undisturbed, but in
the studio all I could paint was them, their tiny hands, their snuggly bodies.
Now my work had returned to more metaphorical and narrative themes.
Often ghosts from my own childhood appear on
the canvases, uninvited. Often my mother’s face appears, twisted by mental
illness. Often my paintings are prayers coming from a deeper place in my heart
than the words can reside. I can put on a pretty good façade in my daily life,
but I can’t hide when I paint. Sometimes in these corners of honesty, God can
confront and heal me as well.
The paintings that follow represent some of
the surprises and transformations that sometimes occur in my work.
Reunion
I wanted to paint a reunion with dear friends
I missed. I remembered how, when I lived in the Sierras, the blue mist would
rise from the valley beyond my back door, and I put a new canvas on the easel.
I painted my friend, Nancy, on her porch, leaning toward me with her arms
outstretched, her little girl clinging to her knees. I began painting myself
running to her excitedly, but it was too effusive. Instead, I drop my suitcase
and look up hesitantly with my hands open but my arms at my sides.
Some people see the figure looking down from
the porch as a crucifixion. A few days after finishing the painting I recognize
my mother’s face on the woman leaning on the porch about to totter off the step
stairs and my own face in that determined child, gripping her knees and keeping
her balance. I’m also the visitor, dreading her embrace but longing for it at
the same time.
It’s a painting of yearning, longing, and
reluctance. It’s a painting of Christ. It’s a painting of my mother. Aren’t
they all intertwined as I cloak God in all the twisted definitions of who a
loving parent is?
Inside/Outside
Usually before I paint, I spend a half hour in
my studio writing in a prayer journal. My aim is to get to the heart of where I
am in my journey with God and to be as honest as possible about my need for
him. Those prayers and scriptures that follow often have a strong influence on
my paintings.
In an attempt to share with God exactly where
I was, I determined to create a painting firmly rooted in the present. There I
am, pushing a stroller, silhouetted in blue against the window of a popular
restaurant in my neighborhood. Some observers have commented on the whimsy and
playfulness in the piece, but one family shuddered and confided to me that they
thought it was of a child going to get her father out of a bar—an event that
had happened repeatedly in their family.
It took me two months to recognize the faces
of every member of my family of origin, both alive and dead, in that
restaurant, and myself in three stages of life, passing outside. For 11 years
I’ve tried to separate myself from the dance of my family—the entrenched
life-scripts we interrelate with—and have felt relief in the distance, but
loneliness as well.
Late
I’ve created six paintings over the years of
people gathered around a table. Most have started as sketches drawn on napkins
when I’m surrounded by friends. In an attempt to prolong the experience of
their companionship, I recreate the dinner parties in paint. I can cover
canvases with friends, but invariably and involuntarily their faces swirl into
the ugly family confrontations of my childhood. Any time I open a woman’s
mouth, the others listen in surly, resentful silence.
Make the woman talk. Make the others listen. A
woman can speak without being crazy. But the first woman I ever heard was my
mother, spewing out rage and anguish. I scratch and claw my way through a
painting of people in a restaurant. There I am, speaking calmly, telling a
story. Some figures are detached and distracted, but one person leans forward
to hear what I have to say. Can God be interested as well?
Fire
For months, even years, my mailbox flamed and
smoked with furious letters from my mother, writhing in her mental illness. I
felt creatively blocked by my own hyper-criticalness. I am on the verge of
giving up painting. I’m always on the verge of giving up painting. Why pay a
sitter to care for my children so I can go to a small room and be terrorized by
a white canvas? I go for a walk, put laundry in the dyer, go into the house for
a cup of tea. My children’s sitter, Mira, growls at me in her Muscovite accent,
“Why am I here? Go out and paint!”
I begin a new canvas of a woman waving a cloth
near burning books and letters. I think I am painting a self-portrait of me
faming the flames of anything that represents my mother, the voracious reader.
But the woman’s position is wrong. She’s too close. Is she trying to smother
the fire she’s started? And what am I to do with my own rage?
Green Room
Three months ago, my mother had a medical
crisis that catapulted me back into close contact with the family I’d tried to
distance myself from for most of my adult life. Suddenly we were sitting
together in emergency rooms, detox wards, and retirement homes.
My older brother arrives at 7:00 a.m., and we
drive together to my mother’s green house in another part of the state.
All the way, he talks about how multiple small strokes and medication have softened
her, making her gentle and dependent. We spend the day at the house, cleaning
and sifting through rooms of books and snapshots and angry letters. So much
violence in that house. I was always so afraid. The ghosts are still there, and
they cling to my clothes as we leave.
They’re still lingering when I go to the
studio the next morning. How can I paint? Five unfinished canvases are waiting
for me. Miserable failures all. The ghosts remind me, “You’re Carol Peterson,
really, and Carol Peterson is not a painter.”
I put away four of the five canvases, saving a
5’x4’ surface. It’s faded green, the color of my mother’s house. Five birds fly
around the ceiling. My mother swats at them with a towel, my brother grabs at
her arm, my sister cries, and I watch from a crouched position in the corner.
Thirty years later, our roles are still clearly established in painful detail.
I cover them with dull green paint. Instead, a
lone girl reaches up her arms as if to imitate the trapped birds’ flight. The
room is still green. It’s still my mother’s house. I’d live to leave it, but
for now it’s where my heart is. I’ll just have to paint through the green.
There’s a mystery about this painting, perhaps a feeling of hope within my
mother’s compressed walls.
Imminence
I painted another hide and seek game. But as I
painted it, it became a game gone wrong. Some of those children are really
scared. Is it a game at all? What are they hiding from? What thundering knock,
what thundering voices are fueling their panic?
This painting was too dark for me. Then, as a
seeming afterthought, I give the woman wings as she peers into the dark. OK. God
is there, even when I’m terrified. I add a child crouching under the bed, ready
to watch what will follow from a safe place. And I, too, am crouching in the
safe place of my painting, sensing God’s protection as he illuminates for me
those feelings I try to keep under cover, feelings of longing and reluctance
and rage and loneliness and hope.
