My art, my life
My walls were speaking to me about my depression. And then they spoke to me about it relieving.
When I first saw Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, it was in poster form. A man was selling famous art posters in the campus quad alongside other student groups, and Christina was centered among the works. I spotted her and stopped very abruptly, turned red, and ran in the opposite direction. I thought that the minute I walked into the open, everyone would know that *I* was actually Christina.
Narcissism aside, I had the reaction above because the painting spoke to me about something, though I didn’t know what it was. My instincts told me to try looking at it again, and I ended up returning to the seller later that week. I gave the print pride of place in my newlywed living room.
Though Christina is sitting, she is in some kind of expectation vis-à-vis the house. The house does not notice her; she expects despite being outside its small palisade. The real Christina, a woman named Christina Olson, actually suffered from a degenerative muscle disease, and preferred crawling to using a wheelchair. Wyeth was her neighbor, and painted her three other times in addition to above. He once shared: “The challenge to me was to do justice to her [Christina’s] extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
Soon after purchasing the print, I couldn’t help notice a parallel between Christina and Jenny from the movie Forrest Gump. In the following scene, Jenny walks by her childhood home with Forrest. After approaching the house slowly, Jenny begins throwing first her shoes at the house and then some rocks, shattering a few windows. She then slumps down to the ground in tears. Forrest the narrator utters, “Sometimes I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.”
I did not experience what Jenny did at the hands of her widowed father. But I did experience something that made me identify with her, and possibly also Wyeth’s Christina as well—a deep loss, and a sense of blame and disregard.
Around the same time, I bought a small reproduction of Picasso’s Blue Nude from 1902.
It is said that Picasso painted the crouching woman following the loss of a friend. It’s one of the many paintings he painted with just the color blue. I had always loved it and found a place for it right next to my desk.
I also finally found the exact minimal frame for a poster from one of my favorite college performances, the Mozart Requiem:
A requiem is music for a funeral mass. Mozart’s Requiem became a character itself in the largely fictional film account of Mozart’s life, Amadeus, based on the play by Peter Sellers. I was quite intimate with the Amadeus soundtrack, and thus jumped at the chance to be part of the chamber orchestra of largely professional musicians to accompany my university choir’s performance of the work. You had to be a real Mozart enthusiast to play, as most musicians were already very busy with other rehearsals, classes, etc. BUT HOW COULD YOU NOT?! One of my closest friends and musical partner-in-crime was a clarinetist, and I still get chills remembering his solo in the “Lacrymosa.”1
But in the context of this post, I was choosing to display a girl with polio, a depressed—possibly abused—young woman and an advertisement to a funeral mass in my home. Happily, of course, as I couldn’t stand the alternative, which to me wasn’t *quite* Thomas Kinkade, but almost.
Leafing thru some old memories, I found a few more interesting pieces:
I ripped this one out of a Harper’s from 2004, and had it taped to the wall above my desk. What is she reaching for in the dark, I wonder?
These were also the years I was getting into fashion, and I found this mailer from a boutique I used to work at:
It was only after staring mindlessly at my computer screen one day that I actually noticed the similarities between the artworks. I kept turning around as I saw every one of my “Jenny’s,” gasping each time I saw yet another evocation, running into other rooms, and finding even more. It was as if my walls knew something that I did not.
I then remembered the last time I ran way from a painting, which was at the Lenbachhaus of fin-de-siècle art in Munich, Germany.
Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff by Alexej von Jawlensky is almost hypnotic. It takes up most of a wall in one of the rooms at the museum, and I just couldn’t handle the dancer’s gaze, even from another room. I likely felt that she too knew something about me that I just couldn’t take. But what was it? And if she turned her gaze toward Christina, Jenny and/or the Blue Nude, what would she see? How would they feel?
Time passed, and my husband and I moved to San Francisco. Our apartment was a duplex built in the 1930’s, and had beautiful hand-carved floral crown moulding throughout, parquet floors and an O’Keefe & Merritt stove that just would not fail. I couldn’t believe my aesthetic luck.
I put my Blue Nude up for a while in the hallway, but decided to take it down after a few days as it just wasn’t the right thing. I then forgot all about decorating for a spell, but had a big nesting push before I had my daughter a few years later. One day I looked around and noticed I had this on the wall:
I think I remember telling a friend that the poster captured my purpose in life. More examples of text-art abounded as I looked around, alongside a lot of white IKEA furniture and magazines, magazines, magazines. Here is an “XOXO” in relief on the wall:
Then I noticed that I had very carefully pulled a few pages from Vogue of the model Sasha Pivovarova’s wedding. I loved the one of her in a pink dress and the sweet quote about her own marriage: “We met at the airport in Moscow while our flight to Turkey was delayed, and he proposed to me a year later in a café in St.-Tropez. I love practically everything about being married.”2 I decided to frame it a little while later:
Our apartment had a beautiful hearth to match the floral crown moulding. What to put up there? I managed to track down a poster I had seen years ago in Maui of all places. I just could never get the little girl’s eyes out of my mind, and luckily found a print still available:
It’s actually a poster of an old Danish grits box. I’ve had a few Scandinavian friends over the years, and they always comment on how strange it is to see what was essentially a Cheerios box to them have pride of place on my mantel.
The Blue Nude is now long gone, as is Christina. Looking at them still affects me, but they no longer fit in my life. As I look around my house now, it’s quite sparse, but I still have a few things up I that I love:
Another woman sitting down, and again in a pink dress! Or so I thought; she’s actually naked.
A few Warriors, face forward, from San Francisco Magazine:
Another warrior, again face forward:
And this one in my daughter’s room:
Old habits die hard, I guess.
Addendum
I actually forgot the main point of this post while writing it yesterday! I was probably just caught up in getting all of the images right. But I remembered last night as I was falling asleep, and of course had to add it here ASAP.
“Inner Child Healing” is a form of therapy that one undergoes with a licensed therapist to help get in touch with the parts of oneself that may have gotten lost from trauma, both “big T” or “little t.” In my life, but especially when I first began therapy, those times kept coming up through conflict in my most intimate relationships. It was clear that I was stuck as “little Miriam,” trying to solve “big Miriam” problems.
I hated the concept from the start. I despised my younger self, and thought it was so cheesy and infantile to still be sad about something that happened years ago. I actually wanted to un-alive her. Because why try and go back to that time? Try and speak to it? But the speaker wasn’t there in the past. Or give it some “self-compassion,” like a hug with some teleporting Care Bear? HELL NO, I thought—total insult to injury. None of this would matter as nothing would change the fact that the abuse still happened, I was still affected by it, and it was wrong.3
But of course my therapist won out over time.4 The young me kept appearing in my present-day life, and I had to face her. We started by simply going back to those times and getting ourselves oriented to the surroundings. That was exhausting in and of itself, but then the next step was to open up even more, and let whatever emotions that I felt come through—for example the shame I felt before my therapist at present, my fear of the dank and unwelcoming room I was in as a child, the scratch of the carpet on my legs.
And over multiple sessions, I began to feel sorry for the little girl. I cried a few times of course, but the sadness wasn’t as severe as the worry I felt for her. And the curiosity. I was beginning to separate from her. And over the years, she grew up.
The girl was still in that room, but no longer a baby. For years I saw her at school age looking outside the bedroom window at the foot of the Mission Peak, loving the wind in her face. She was usually alone, but I saw her welcome a few people into the space; first my husband, but as a father, and a dear girlfriend. And then she became a young woman, wearing a threadbare pink dress with her hair tied in a ponytail.
I understand that many spiritual traditions have parallels to this sort of experience, whether it’s the meditating Watcher, the Buddha consciousness or the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ. One of my friend’s moms had a Christian prayer ministry unto this sort of experience, and I began praying with a few trusted people on this woman in particular. I also learned to pray for others.
Over the years, I have looked to this woman mostly in times of distress—when I just don’t know what I should do in a difficult situation, or when I’m been bogged down with worry over my children. She’s brought me great comfort over the years.
And one day last year, I saw that she was no longer in the dark room! She was in a white house full of windows, teeming with light. And I loved her.
Thank you for visiting.
I really do feel that I hit the jackpot playing the violin. It’s like a front row seat to one of the most incredible shows in human history. In general it’s tough for non-solo instrumentalists to like Mozart due to form reasons, so besides the opera people, pianists and violinists, it’s usually the clarinetists that love him most. Wolfy absolutely loved that thing! Oh and the French horn players as he apparently had a friend who played the French horn. In my opinion oboists should love him more as he made that instrument sound so incredibly sexy. Yes, sexy! Yes, classical music!
For a recent take of the extended film version of Amadeus, check out Chris Jesu Lee’s post, “Over-Explaining in Art.”
Grace Coddington is a celebrated fashion stylist, and the quiet heroine of the documentary film, The September Issue (2009). Her mark on a fashion shoot such as the one of Sasha’s wedding is unmistakable—do look thru all the pictures at the link above as it is absolutely gorgeous. I had planned at one point to purchase her tomes of work and frame my favorite prints, but just never got around to it. Someday! But I think this is another example of what I love about the world—there is quality art everywhere, by incredible artists, even in a magazine that costs $4.99.
I remember telling my husband about this and he asked, “Could I go back and take care of you?” The answer is yes, he could, and I think I resorted to that for a while because I couldn’t figure anyone else. His role is very akin to Alice Miller’s idea of an “Enlightened Witness”—someone who treats an abusee differently than he/she is used to by his abuser and thus creates a psychic tension that essential to healing.
I really think stubbornness is a very underrated quality.
H&IPM!