Maybe It’s About Loosening the Grip

How much of my art is a holding onto the past? How much of it is a letting go? I posed those two questions in a journal entry once. Well, knowing me, more than once.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve started talking about my art with people. I imagine that they find my revelations about my mother a bit surprising. I don’t. I’ve long known that 90 percent of my art centers on, or circles back to, my mother: to my thoughts on her, my feelings about her, my regrets over a relationship that was not as candid as it should have been.

The fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s death will arrive in three days. I’m okay with that now, but it took me nearly a decade and the working out of my thoughts and feelings through art and poetry to get to that point. I miss her, and I wish that she could have had more years to spend with her grandchildren. She died before Jack and Stella were born, and I can imagine the special relationships she would have had with them.

Mom left this world two days after my sister’s birthday. I am forever grateful that she held out that long. I don’t know how my sister would fare if she had to remember Mom’s death each time she marks another year of her life. In fact, she called me yesterday to let me know that her dog died, and she even said something like, “Thank goodness he didn’t die on my birthday. I couldn’t have handled that.”

But back to those questions—I’ve become very fond of questions, you know. Am I holding onto the past or letting go of it? Maybe a bit of both. My mother’s handwriting, photographs, even the items she crocheted and embroidered have places in my art. Many of these can no longer be distinguished, because I’ve covered them with paint, ink, paper, and who-knows-what-all. That’s the way I have to do it, though. These pieces of her are in my work, just as her DNA is in my blood. Nobody needs to see it. Nobody even needs to know it’s there. The point is that I know.