Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  My father was spending nights in my mother’s room in skilled nursing under a blanket the nurses gave him for his bedside vigil. On the phone he told me, weeping, that Dona had said—to the room, not particularly to him:

  I don’t want to die.

  This broke his heart again, and it echoed in my ears all night and into the morning. The remarkable thing in her statement and in his repeating it to me was the forthright phrase “to die” instead of their New Age euphemism, “to make one’s transition.” They were both preparing for the inevitable, though I still didn’t have an idea of when, exactly, it would be. Perhaps Frank was expecting “the end” sooner than it would actually occur, perhaps out of grief fatigue.

  I was in my lithography class when a phone call from Dona’s hospice nurse interrupted the counter-etch of my litho plate. Come immediately, she won’t last out the week. That call from Oakland plucked me out of a morass. I had been so sluggish, so emptied out and exhausted, more debilitated than my usual tired. I was living a muddle, struggling through a swamp of slimy, clotted vegetation ensnaring my legs and feet in a bottom I could not see. My actions lacked all meaning. That was how I felt, even though I had not wasted my time. There was a disjunction between my feelings—narcose, lethargic—and my actions—effective and organized. Through the fall’s anxious weeks, I had been working on copyedited MFB and took chapters twenty-five through twenty-seven to Oakland with me.

  Frank’s response intrigued me, for he was unusually composed in those very last days of his vigil by Dona’s hospital bed. That vigil carried him to another plane, where he slept better and nearly relinquished self-pity. Would his depression lift with Dona’s passing? Glenn saw Frank’s depression as a response to her failing health. I rather saw it the other way, that she broke down under the strain of trying to keep him going. Maybe we’re both right, as my parents were so intimately connected.

  AT SALEM, I returned to what had become my second home, the little no-color, one-room cottage 2C: single bed, bureau with a boxy old-time TV on top, night table with lamp, bathroom, and closet, everything brown and gray and sad worn-out white. The whole cottage was smaller than our bedroom in Newark. The radiator clanked infernally all night. Salem’s feral cats yowled outside unceasingly.

  Over in skilled nursing, my mother was comatose, eyes 90 percent closed, mouth open, head back, oxygen tube around her nose and neck, its pump both generator and iron lung and sounding like it. A noisy thing, never letting me forget its life-giving function. The time would come, and soon, when it would no longer suffice.

  My father was keeping his watch, another night in the chair by Mom’s bed. He held her hand, monitoring the relative strength and weakness of her pulse. I watched the faint rise and fall in her throat of her breathing. He stayed in Dona’s room, saying he couldn’t sleep at home for worrying about her. I believed him.

  Dona had many visitors in her last two days, some praying and singing her over. A Religious Science friend sang sweet Hebrew songs to comfort her dying. Even though Dona couldn’t register any reaction, we knew she knew we were there. I hoped so; Frank certainly hoped so, wanting so deeply to be with her when she “made her journey.”

  The process of my mother’s dying lasted more than two days, her face going slack, not just mouth open, but tongue falling to the side, jaw also slumped to the side, and eyes sunken and unfocused. I hadn’t thought before of all the muscular effort required to hold the face composed. Except for the obvious exertion required to express emotion, I took muscle tone for granted. But I see now that even a lack of emotion makes muscles work. Dying releases everything, like a stream feeling its way down a landscape, seeking its lowest level.

  My mother died at three in the afternoon on a Thursday. My father and I were both there, one on either side, each holding a hand, when she died. Emptiness. Frank summoned the strength to go to Mosswood Chapel mortuary with me to sign her death certificate. Where did he find the power to face this testament of ending? I didn’t ask this about myself, accustomed as I was by then to taking charge of my parents’ lives and fates. I think now that Dona passed organization on to me in a transfer she had begun years before as part of my inheritance.

  Before Thursday ended, the mortician took away what was left of my mother in a small black plastic bag. Though I had been with her as she died and sat with her for a time while she was very dead, the smallness of that package shocked me. A plastic bag contained my entire mother, except for the twenty-one grams of her soul. That small plastic package sealed her deadness. A living person, asleep, might be stretched out on a bed in skilled nursing, but a person still alive could never fit into so small a black plastic bag. It seemed a final insult, the diminution of my beloved mother into a parcel to be carried by hand.

  I WAS DOUBTING my artist’s bona fides before my mother as a visual spectacle. If I were a real artist, I accused myself, I would have drawn or photographed her dying. I had that thought before she died, struggling to make myself see her as a motif and to draw her. But I could not draw my dying mother, even to insert her image into my one hundred drawings. I could not take my sketchbook into her room, a gesture that I felt would distance her from me. I tried. I failed. LaToya Ruby Frazier made a poignant series of photographs of her family’s physical decline. Annie Leibovitz photographed the fatal illness of her partner Susan Sontag. Roz Chast made an entire, hilarious book about her parents’ old age, ending with sober drawings of her mother on her deathbed. I could not do that. Feeling numb, weeping now and then, I loaded my failure as an artist onto my daughter grief.

  HOW TIRED COULD a person get? I was plumbing the depths of exhaustion swamp as never before. Lord knows, I’ve been tired in this life of mine. If my prior experience with exhaustion weren’t so extensive, so, well, exhaustive, I’d say I’d never been so tired in my life. So I just collapsed in my infernal 2C cubbyhole, with the diabolical radiator clanking all day and night and the goddam cats yowling.

  It took weeks to wind up my mother’s death and arrange her triumphant “Celebration of Life” at the First Church of Religious Science in Oakland. Even cremated, my mother, from her perch in wherever it is good people go after death, would have been counting up the four hundred and more who came out for her. My father managed Dona’s celebration with his erstwhile charm and grace. Once the public appearance ended, he fell back into depression. He left me to deal with everything, every single fucking thing. And then, to all his many friends, he accused me of abandoning him. I was furious, totally furious at his disregard. Finally back in New Jersey, I was a wreck.

  I RETURNED TO classes at Mason Gross with my hysterical leg—not just knee, the whole fucking leg, groin, thigh front and back, knee all around, calf front and sides and back, ankle all around, all throbbing like hell. Muscle-relaxing pills didn’t help. Breathing into the pain didn’t help. Three Excedrin didn’t help.

  One day in lithography class I felt faint.

  Sit down! Sit down!

  My eyes would not focus.

  Sit down! Sit down!

  Other students’ voices went muffled.

  Sit down! Sit down!

  I had to sit down, but sitting was too hard.

  Lie down! Lie down!

  I lay down.

  I lay down on the floor behind the press, didn’t care who saw me.

  One Hundred* Drawings for Hanneline, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable

  No one saw me. They were too far away at the other end of the room and too absorbed in their own work. I just blotted into the floor behind the press.

  Strength and focus returned in a few moments, at least I thought it was a few moments. I stumbled down the hall to the water fountain and drank. My poor old body, my poor old woman’s body, just could not manage it all any longer.

  My doctor named this syncope, passing out. At least it wasn’t a stroke. I managed to complete my Rutgers semester, to show some of the sixty-seven, not one hundred, drawings in One Hundred Drawing
s for Hanneline, and graduate. Whew.

  11

  A BAD DECISION

  What colors were these? I couldn’t name them, just a mood—desperate, without clarity to give that mood a name. Those colors were showing up in my paintings, wan, desaturated grays and browns, reds drained of life, blues bereft of light, reflections of my desaturated life. I’m going backward here, for my mother hadn’t yet died, but she was headed only one way. We hadn’t said “die,” but death already overlaid me. Something new was showing up in a shape I couldn’t discern. It felt like limits.

  I’d never felt the boundaries of my lifetime before, but now, in a new way, unfocused but definite, my years no longer seemed to stretch out before me. At the same time, I didn’t feel lifetime boundaries as boundaries on my life. This will sound muddled. I was muddled. It wasn’t that I exactly felt hurried, but I absolutely needed to move on. Urgently.

  I thrashed about like one of those poor scrawny wild creatures, a wolf, a fox, in a barbed trap whose teeth bit into my ensnared paw. Wolf-me, fox-me, shackled to my fellow undergraduates’ fecklessness, tardiness, incomplete assignments, and whiny foot-dragging.

  Jesus H. Christ!

  My fellow students were roadblocks in my way, and now, influenced by art school but unaware, I was thinking in a sort of careerist way, as though I were now on a route to somewhere, and they were standing, sprawling, all over my road. What about their colorful brilliance, their zany humor and stupendous overnight productions?

  Forgotten.

  What about their endlessly detailed narratives of frustration and delight?

  Ignored.

  Malaise blotted out my pleasure in their youthful bountifulness, for I wanted to bear down, to do, do, do, do more, now, now, now, with time pressing down on me. I sensed their uneasiness with my intensity, for I no longer had the comradeship of ambitious Mason Gross Keith. He abandoned me, dropping out on account of “health issues.” Even my one graduate seminar left me as frustrated as my undergraduate classes. I wanted to work too much and talk too much about my work, their work, other artists’ work, art history, criticism, and society in art and politics. My blah blah blah, endlessly. There must be some means of pushing harder. Approaching his retirement on cruise control, Teacher Tom shushed me.

  As my mother sank in my transcontinental parental drama, urgency—that’s how it felt—urgency led me astray. Instead of spending a fourth year honing my skills as a Mason Gross undergraduate, I decided to apply to graduate school. Where was my common sense? What on earth was I thinking?

  How could I not have connected my mother’s decline to my irritations with Mason Gross? How did I fail to see the impact of repeated cross-country trips, each time throwing myself up against my mother’s destiny and my father’s misery? These correlations—so glaringly obvious to me now, so clearly recognizable as the very reasons that even internet therapy warns you not to make life-altering decisions in the midst of psychological turmoil—those correlations I failed to make at the time.

  Rather than thinking, I felt. I felt irritation at Mason Gross, where my studies and my fellow students had formerly offered so much pleasure. My mother lay dying; I had to get out.

  Get out of undergraduate school.

  I wondered about graduate school, which I envisioned as a sacred place of intense study and art making. But what did it take to get in? Grades? I had excellent grades, meaning, I assumed, my work was interesting and good. Productivity? I was fuckingly productive. Visual imagination? I had that in abundance, lots of color and line inspired by art history and history history. Hmmmm, maybe the history parts weren’t so positive after all. My fellow students drew their content from a well of right-now popular culture that was not my own. Definitely a weakness on my part. But, on the other hand, I could be a great colorist, even when mired in worry. Discipline? My self-discipline could build an ivory tower. Maybe another weakness.

  Nonetheless, what more interesting person, what more unique character than me? Who wouldn’t want a me among their students, with my ability to think and talk and encourage others? My graduate student teachers asked me for pointers and added that the students were lucky to have me in classes. I had a lot to offer, a hell of a lot to offer.

  At the same time, a conviction circulated widely about the impossibility of getting into art school, kind of like a religious tenet or an urban legend. This belief discounted all that I had to offer by elevating the portfolio into admission stratosphere. The portfolio had to consist of exciting, skillful art. Was my art exciting and skillful? Eh . . . it depended on who was looking. One thing was clear: my portfolio would not show drawings of renaissance skill or cutting-edge installations. My strong points were curiosity, thoughtfulness, and extraordinary growth during my two-plus years at Mason Gross. Like every other aspirant, I wanted to go to Yale School of Art, for an excellent art school and for a phenomenal university.

  That, I recognized, would constitute an astounding leap for me. I knew of ways to bridge the gap between my current portfolio and a portfolio that would get me into graduate school, programs that function like prep schools. I knew that prep school is about more than building skills. Prep school is also a place to make crucial connections with the people who matter, those artists who decide what counts as art and as art that counts as the right kind of art in the right now. Yes, you learn there, and, in addition and just as important, people who can help you get to know you. That latter point may count as heavily for an aspiring professional artist as what you stand to learn. You can be the greatest artist in the world, but if the eyes that matter aren’t on your work, and if the people who count don’t speak up for you, you hardly exist beyond your own local circle. I wanted more than that.

  I investigated three prep programs. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio was a thirty-credit-hour program for building a graduate school admission portfolio. That sounded perfect for me, but it had one terrific drawback: it was in Chicago, too far away from Newark and Oakland. Maybe if I were a more driven artist, I would have set aside my marriage and my parents. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t do that. Then there was the Yale Summer School at Norfolk, Connecticut. For Norfolk, I would have had to be nominated by Mason Gross while I was a junior, which I kind of was. But I had never heard of anyone going to Norfolk from Mason Gross. Was this information being kept secret from me? Or was Norfolk simply not in the Mason Gross orbit? In any case, no Norfolk for me. Then there was Skowhegan, which I’d known about forever, even in California, without knowing more about it than its storied names—Ben Shahn, Philip Pearlstein, and so on.

  I looked more closely into Skowhegan, but its rule of keeping you on site for nine weeks put it out of my reach. Had I ever in recent memory gone nine whole weeks without a trip to Oakland? What if I got homesick for Glenn? Norfolk and Skowhegan, especially, seemed too much like adolescent summer camps for me to endure for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for weeks on end. Exuberant young people creating art intensively, expressively in gigantic gestures and series of all-night wonders of solitary and cooperative imagination. Fantastic art. Never-seen-before art. Tattooed art kids bounding around in shorts and flip-flops, day and night, amazed by what was still news to them, annoyed by misunderstood rules, propelled by hormonal surges, drinking and drugging and fucking in the bushes, throwing up in their studios. Exhilarating, yes, indeed, but exhausting. Okay for ten or twelve hours a day, but probably not for twenty-four, not for three months. Not for me.

  Clearly, the art summer camps would have done the trick of shaking my eyes loose from the twentieth century and bringing my portfolio into line with current notions of exciting art. No, wait. There was a further problem—no, there was my further problem—that much of currently exciting art looked to me like random piles of things: RPT. Surely there was some other art beyond RPT, for I saw other art in magazines and museums and galleries in New York City. There were a lot of different kinds of art a
round, some I might be able to manage. But at what price? Could I pay it? I needed some expert advice.

  I TOOK MY questions to Teacher Irma, who was a visiting critic at Yale School of Art and who wrote trenchantly in the art magazines, even writing against the grain of convention. Her essays were substantive, and she wrote about women and non-white artists before they became hot, something not to be taken for granted, something I deeply appreciated. As a critic she was totally fabulous.

  I also liked her painting a lot. A special trip to Chinatown in New York City to see her solo show left me in awe. Her blend of abstraction and anthropomorphism reminded me of another awesome artist, the Iraqi painter Ahmed Alsoudani. They both move in and out and between figuration and abstraction with a tumultuous sense of space. He is more drawn (literally) to the chaos of life in our times than she, but they’re both great colorists. His paintings are more turbulent than hers, but I find both psychologically postmodern. My student eye for process examined her ravishing paintings from a distance and up close, searching out clues on her scale and technique, her overlapping shapes to convey distance, her color—her absolutely amazing color, bombastic texture evoking collage through paint—and her imagination. Totally fabulous as a painter.

  Here was the person to ask about graduate school. I approached her in the painting studio during a long break when no other students were around. I was feeling sheepish asking about graduate school when my paintings left so much to be desired. But I trusted her to cue me in, to help me parse the various qualities that count in graduate admission. I spoke with trepidation, not taking anything for granted. It was guidance I needed, a conversation about my strengths and weaknesses. That’s not what I got.