The Artists
From the time when I was very young, artists surrounded me. Just one at first. She woke me in the morning, dressed me in T-shirts and shorts with my name written on the tags, dropped me off, smiling, at the front desk, and picked me up late in the evening on her way back from the studio.
Playing long games of Candyland with my preschool teachers after the other pupils had gone home, I liked to imagine my mother picking me up covered in splotches of paint, smelling of turpentine, her aura adorned at the edges with a frenetic artistic madness. Of course, I didn’t know any of those words at the time — “turpentine,” “aura,” “adorned,” “frenetic,” “madness.” I just knew the vision I had, someone with bright colors flying out from the borders of her skin. But she was never flying apart, never frenetic or mad. She smelled of rose perfume and minty shampoo and, dressed pristinely, would buckle me into the car seat and drive carefully home with no hint of wildness in her eyes.
The wildness showed itself only on the canvas, and then only occasionally. I rarely knew exactly what she was painting, but I knew what the colors tasted like in my mind. Even when they tasted of salt and wind and rain, there was none of that sour tang that came with fear. Any chaos she created still had an order to it, a purpose, so it was never true chaos; perhaps passion is a better word, or even beauty, as her work was beautiful in the way that a rainforest is beautiful — wild by literal definition, but each brushstroke pulsing with a distinct sense of intention. I watched her create her wild abstract expressionistic masterpieces, standing and staring for brief stretches of eternity before slowly and meditatively applying color.
There is a line between chaos and creativity. My mother bounced on that shoreline, buoyed by a pure, romantic aspiration to beauty, poking at the bubbles that beaded the waves of chaos. If her job was to render beauty as she saw it, she could do so without attempting to quantify the unquantifiable, could do so without attempting to understand the parts of her craft which were so absurd and inaccessible to the human mind. She was never swayed by hubris, and if it ever tugged from the depths of her brain, she never let on.
More artists would come and go through my life. More games of Candyland with teachers that could spin gold out of oil pastels; more sitting on rainbow-colored rugs and singing nonsense songs with a woman whose voice rung out over all of ours, rich and full; more wobbling at the lowest rung of the barre while grown-ups in pointe shoes jumped and spun and held one another, filling the air in exquisite ways. As I got older, I would find poets who wrote of mouthfuls of seeds and eyeballs rolling like pinwheels. I would find musicians whose fingers trembled mightily over their glossy, carved instruments. I would attempt to commit myself to an art, to try and fill pages in exquisite ways, but in reality, I committed more to becoming art itself, to becoming an instrument for one of those trembling musicians to pluck and strum.
My musician held me elegantly. He balanced me between his knees and gripped my neck with firm, precise fingertips. I would watch him upon his lonely stage, a dark shadowed figure, hidden by his lustrous cello, and I would watch his thin, sinewy arm shudder with pressure as he made it sing. The cello has the same range as the human voice. When he held me, thin and shuddering, I ignored the tension, and my body sang; I believed I became music itself for small, precious seconds until I, too, began to shake under the pressure of his refined hand. Never, I realized, would I stand as firm as the thick wooden cello. A man who cradles an instrument is not made to cradle a woman. I swore I would never allow myself to be taken by an artist again.
To dedicate one’s life to creating music, which are sound waves, which are in no way tangible, is already hubris enough; to search for that same grace and control in a human is far worse; and to be the human striving to be the art, to attempt to personify the strict beauty of those zero-dimensional sound waves in three solid dimensions — well. I resolved to limit the artistry in my life to that of my mother and my schoolteachers.
Despite this plan, the wound the musician’s trembling hand had left on my body had barely begun to heal when another artist walked into my life. “Walked” is the wrong word. He ambled, making his way to me leisurely, confidently. My mother liked him instantly. There was no chaos in his soul. The new artist was the same as her, because he was in love with beauty, and his soul had no chaos, but he was different, because he was a bit in love with chaos too. His art was where it laid.
My mother’s art was wild from afar, huge abstract oil paintings with thick black brushstrokes and dashes of magenta, cobalt, and lime. Up close, it was controlled. Each flick had meaning, each drip a path to follow. My mother’s hand, which trembled perpetually from the nerves in her back, could be felt if you looked closely enough. There, in bold strokes, it was — quivering as if with trepidation, exposing the great slow tension with which she held the brush.
Where my mother’s art was wild on the surface, the other artist’s was tidy; but where hers was careful, his was turbulent. He drew more tame things, people mostly. He drew his mother and his father and himself, and he drew the faces of women he’d loved in the past. Each drawing, no matter of whom, was perfect from the outside. Lines and shades combined to make distinct, lovely human forms. The faces held expression; the bodies were poised. His drawings were easy to know. They didn’t have to be tasted.
Up close, though, one saw that every shadow was a scribble, an amorphous area haphazardly filled in, and at this second glance, his drawing would feel far wilder than any rainforest, would feel like the rain itself, roiling and turning and condensing in the clouds. Yet the chaos was harnessed and controlled, treated with grace. In both his and my mother’s work, you could see that the artists held a deep respect for chaos, and an equal respect for themselves, that they did not let themselves be taken over by it.
One thing to be grateful for: I was not his muse. I saw the drawing that he did of the girl that came before me, the one where her hair was flowing and the white pencil on the brown paper sharpened her nose and brightened her face and rendered her an angel. I saw the love and wonderment in that drawing, but I was tired of being a muse.
The only art that I have ever truly been was when my mother managed to project a portion of my soul into a portrait many years ago. In it, there were no faces. There were no bodies. It was light blue and dark blue and light pink and neon green and gray and white, and there were drips and blocks and deep washes of color. I felt myself in that painting, but most of all I felt my mother’s eyes on me, and that will always be the truest angle from which to see me. But I am not her muse; I am her daughter. And my artist is not my artist, but my boy who happens to be an artist, just as I am not his muse, though I could be, but that is too much of oneself to devote to one person. To conflate one’s loves, to combine romantic love with inspiration, poisons both.
Perhaps my mother is not a true artist because she does not delve into the madness of her craft. Perhaps my artist is not a true lover because he cannot find his artistic love and romantic love in me at the same time. But then, perhaps being a “true” anything is reckless and hubristic, confining oneself to a simple definition of self and leaving no room for anything else.
