Ruth Parson 2005
W
hat about it, my original art?
There I sit, unkempt in my braid and house shirt, straining in my old lady glasses, a brush in each hand challenging, inviting, cajoling, and finally in the deep crevices, allowing my brain to search, struggle, reach, and snap into place. I'm painting in gouache on a paper block, striving to remember where my art and I last met and how these dance steps go.
It is more than an effort, that can be seen, to shrug off the day job that hounds me waking and sleeping and that personal life all resolutely metered with its cleaning, planning, resting, engaging. Where in that photo, whose snapping I clearly ignored because I was awfully busy in my effort to make a brushstroke and its color resemble its parent, are the broad gestures and the youth that fell in love with art?
Right inside, just right down in the heart, is that girl, making another piece of art no matter what because there is not a choice about art. You are an artist and it will just wait inside you for the chance to lunge at the tools you might have walked by a million times before you'd let it grab them up and get to work. Shamelessly art carries on its job, the moment it gets a chance, no matter how long it had to hold its breath, no matter how faint it has become in the waiting. Art will be made.
Art and I started up together when I was about eight. Rather late from what I understand talking with other artists. I started out a writer really, moral tales with some childish drawings to objectify them. I danced, I played flute, I made clothes, I made plays with my sisters. Writing was what I was serious about. Unfortunately my stories became more obscured as my little life took turns odd and more odd, finally becoming so enigmatic there seemed no way in.
The day, late in spring nineteen-sixty-five, that the plagiarist garnered the highest kudos and I was told my work was painfully and regularly trite, I quit writing. Even then, art would not leave me. I stumbled into a high school sculpture class, salving my wounds. Well, this was a place in which art found herself quite comfortable. I was stunned, stupefied, regaled.
More odd turns, art and I took a hiatus while I married and mothered and lost. Art returned, as has been her habit, when I understood that she works as a preventive, as a curative. Through my second and third decades I studied psyche for a living and sculpted to understand, to bear, and because the art that resided in my hands insisted on having life too.
Then painting showed up. Oo la la. Oil Paint. I'll say it again, Oil Paint. My eyes reach up to a spot just at the base of heaven. I sigh and rub the fingers of my other hand together, as if over the sweet body of color, mixed just so, like love, like the best food, fabric, skin. When the sensation sweeps me, the fingers of both hands swim slowly, reminiscently. Then we have canvas, freshly prepared with rabbit skin glue. Horrid, I know. I am sorry, but it is so right, so old, so very much the living breath of art. It brings true liveliness to the canvas. It so lovingly beckons the paint. I say my sorrys to the rabbits and venerate them for their deeply enticing gift.
I have at turns painted in every spare moment, then only in my head for years. Art though, never leaves me. Sometimes my heart, wincing and pinching in on itself when it has been too long, fears that I'll never get to painting again, or my long lost sculpture. I will count on her to show up and am thankful to have Steve, my dear, my artist, to help us out.
Steve has been egging me on and holding my place in art since we met up in nineteen-seventy eight. He's been integral to my art life when that other side, the work I have done with mental illness over thirty years time, takes a grab at me and won't let go. He led me across the bridge from three dimensional renderings to two, what joy. Over the years he has inspired me, collaborated with me, shamed me, and trusted me. He has held my place when all the art in me went to my other work.
This business here is a part of the collection of art I have made, the art thoughts I have had, the life I lived that couched the art I have been making since the mid-nineteen seventies. I hope that some day there will be time to add those books I made when I was eight and all the notes and epics I scratched and typed, in an effort to name what my life is made of. I don't know why exactly. Probably because this has been a dear old sweet life and so full of hope when it seemed there shouldn't be a spark of it. I want to pass that hope on in this world that can to some, seem so dreary and dire, even on an early spring afternoon such as this.
rp
4.08.05
