Thanks, Mick.My life is exhausting. Plain and simple. The only thing that keeps me anything resembling sane is that I set aside days to do absolutely nothing. Sunday was one of those days, and seeing as it was my birthday, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to sit around in my pajamas and read all the books I've been meaning to get to for forever and a day, but the thing about exhausting lives is that they never go the way you think they are going to.
I'd just gotten off the phone with my Nana (she has to sing 'White Cliffs of Dover' to me every year) and was getting settled in a lawn chair on the patio when I heard the sound of a car crawling up the hill. My friend Sandy pulled in and pulled up a chair. We sat for nearly an hour, just talking about 'stuff' when she jumped up and said "Oh, I've got something for you." She went to her car and returned with a canvas. She handed it to me, and on the front I could see a pencil-sketch of a cabin and some trees, there were a few purplish colors swaths as well. I flipped the canvas over and noticed a lot of scribbling along the frame, things like: "Front snow: Wh & very little purple" "Shadow & bushes: lilac & B.umber" "Add B.sienna to back ground color" Sandy explained to me that she was finally finished with cleaning out her mother's house--Mary had died nearly a year ago-- and this picture was in her 'working window'. She told me "It's not finished yet. It needs to be finished" and then asked me: "Would you finish this?"
The difficult part is trying to tell all of the emotions I was feeling at the time. I'll try my best....A few months ago, when Sandy was doing the initial housecleaning, she came to my house with a box full of brushes, sketches, rolled canvas, and more little half-used tubes of acrylic paints than I could count. She gave them to me, knowing that if there was a use left in them, I'd find it. I did. I'm not a huge fan of acrylics, never have been, but as I took time out to build frames, and stretch and gesso, I started to feel a little bit of that first elation that art always give me. It's a creative event about to take place.
It is also difficult to tell about brushes. Any artist will know, and a non-artist will look at you like you've got two heads. I could tell "Her" brushes. I could reach blindly into the jar, grab one, and if the balance and wear were different than mine, I could tell. At first it was very unnerving. (Those teeth marks there...those aren't mine!) but gradually I became accustomed to using them--I even have a favourite--and spent a great deal of time just playing with them. "If it feels comfortable like 'this'--then she must have held her hand like 'this'..." For a little while, I could see a glimmer of what it must have been like to be Mary.
I didn't know Mary very well. What I did know of her, I adored. She was certainly my kinda gal. The first time I met her was at a bridal shower that Sandy was throwing for me. I am absolutely horrible at those sorts of things. There is none worse. All of the women were having some sort of gown-building contest using streamers and toilet paper or something....I made a lame excuse to go to the bathroom, and I ran like a dog. When I got outside, I noticed a big blue puff of smoke coming around the corner of the building and I figured it was just 'the guys'. (Guys I can handle. I'll take a garage full of beer- drinkers over a tupperware party any day of the week.) I crept around the corner and walked right into Mary, big as life, sitting on the hood of Sandy's car and smoking a cigar.
We sat outside for a while, the fugitives from bridal shower hell, and it was nice to be with someone who appreciated the value of good quiet. She finally looked at me and said: "I'm the one who gave you the paper towels". Truth. I had been a little shocked, after gifts of measuring spoons, etc, to unwrap a gigantic case of paper towels, but not only am I a chicken, I also appreciate the mystery in some things, and wasn't going to ask her "WHY a case of paper towels" if my life depended on it. She blew a big puff of smoke and continued: "When my husband and I got married, we drove to our new home only to find that a truck had lost a big box right in our front yard. My husband went out with his flashlight, and came back in laughing like a loon. The box was a case of paper towels. It took us until our first anniversary to get through all of them, and it was the most practical thing we'd received. So, since our marriage wasn't harmed any by it, I give them to everyone as wedding gifts." I grinned and replied: "Oh, I just thought it was because you were nuts" and she returns with another puff of smoke and says: "Well, there's always that too..."
The first I'd heard of her death was when Sandy came to my office with the first box of supplies. I was shocked and more than a little sad, but it was only the sad of not getting a chance to know a good person a little better. When Sandy brought me the canvas, I figured that this was as good a reprieve as I was going to get. I set the canvas on my studio stand, and walked around it for a while thinking "Mary, Mary, what we gonna do?" The things I knew about her already were that she was decidedly fond of practicing and trying out designs on waxed paper (I use any scrap that comes to hand), she liked themes of flowers and sad-eyed kittens (I am an art snob) she was a tube squeezer (where I am a tube roller), and she constantly wrote herself little notes about the painting she was working on (same here).
Needless to say, my nice day spent doing nothing was totally shot by now. I found the box of her acrylics in the studio, and set to trying out some colours when I realized that if I was going to use her colours, I was going to use her brushes too. The balance would force me to hold them like Mary would have. It was infuriating. I felt I had to stop myself and reconnect on a minute-by-minute basis. This wasn't mine. I would never have done some crap-western-art-cabin-in-the-trees painting. The colours felt wrong--but it really wasn't my decision to make, now was it? She wouldn't mind a stand of birches to balance that gigantic leaning tree she drew, would she? I kept working, and wiping off my/her brushes on a sheet of those damned paper towels. Laughing, crying, asking the cat what HE thought about the whole process ('indifferent' for those that are keeping score), throwing things, and generally being bad company.
I was asked today what it felt like to look through 'her window'. It was difficult, but incredibly enlightening. In between singing "White Cliffs of Dover" with my Nana and later singing "Lilac Bush" along with our UncleDaveO there was a flood of wishes from family and friends that kept me on a roller-coaster. We have birth and life and death, with all of the sparkly bits in between, and damn the greater good-- just who is going to be trusted to follow the directions on the back of MY canvas?
Why do I sing? For the same reason I paint, and laugh, and cry, and blink, and breathe. Some days it's better than curling up with a good book.
~JE