January 15, 2002
I am currently engaged in attempting to write my mother’s biography for a catalogue to accompany a retrospective exhibition she is having at the end of 2002. There is something slightly unnerving about wading through the almost illegible slanted writing and the cut and pasted typed material taken from old catalogues. She appears to have been an adventurous creature, joining the R.A.F. during the Second World War, studying in London, and traveling widely and alone before succumbing to marriage at the then horribly late age of forty. There never seems to have been any doubt about what she wanted to do and yet her capacity to articulate this knowledge lags so far behind her painting ability that it leaves me with a feeling of vertigo. She constantly strays from the tone required for such a treatise: she’s studying Rembrandt’s etching techniques in the National Library (relevant enough material), but then we get several long paragraphs about watching the Dublin pigeons play with chipped plaster from the Library’s dome, the noise of which distracts her from her studies. There are long lists of long-dead Dublin artists, people forgotten by posterity, but whom loom large in her lexicon of a painting life. I ruthlessly edit them out and we argue on the phone about why they should or shouldn’t be included. A six month stint in Connemara turns into a weather report for the period as a result of an uncharacteristically hot summer which fell in the middle of her sojourn there. Mention of a borrowed studio in Spain turns into a reminiscence of a young man who would arrive at 6 a.m. to chisel away at tessera pieces of marble for a large mosaic (what else did he chisel away at I find myself wondering). So I edit it with as much objectivity as I can summon while simultaneously learning more concrete facts about my mother than I have managed to elicit in forty years. Who am I to delete her chiseling young Spaniard in Tarragona; to omit the freakishly warm Irish summer of 1955; to murder the National Library pigeons; to banish the old lady painters I remember coming for Sunday dinners with their tweeds as thick as their Anglo accents?
She agrees to my edits, resigns herself to the nature of such a piece.
I resolve to keep the original document.
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I am currently engaged in attempting to write my mother’s biography for a catalogue to accompany a retrospective exhibition she is having at the end of 2002. There is something slightly unnerving about wading through the almost illegible slanted writing and the cut and pasted typed material taken from old catalogues. She appears to have been an adventurous creature, joining the R.A.F. during the Second World War, studying in London, and traveling widely and alone before succumbing to marriage at the then horribly late age of forty. There never seems to have been any doubt about what she wanted to do and yet her capacity to articulate this knowledge lags so far behind her painting ability that it leaves me with a feeling of vertigo. She constantly strays from the tone required for such a treatise: she’s studying Rembrandt’s etching techniques in the National Library (relevant enough material), but then we get several long paragraphs about watching the Dublin pigeons play with chipped plaster from the Library’s dome, the noise of which distracts her from her studies. There are long lists of long-dead Dublin artists, people forgotten by posterity, but whom loom large in her lexicon of a painting life. I ruthlessly edit them out and we argue on the phone about why they should or shouldn’t be included. A six month stint in Connemara turns into a weather report for the period as a result of an uncharacteristically hot summer which fell in the middle of her sojourn there. Mention of a borrowed studio in Spain turns into a reminiscence of a young man who would arrive at 6 a.m. to chisel away at tessera pieces of marble for a large mosaic (what else did he chisel away at I find myself wondering). So I edit it with as much objectivity as I can summon while simultaneously learning more concrete facts about my mother than I have managed to elicit in forty years. Who am I to delete her chiseling young Spaniard in Tarragona; to omit the freakishly warm Irish summer of 1955; to murder the National Library pigeons; to banish the old lady painters I remember coming for Sunday dinners with their tweeds as thick as their Anglo accents?
She agrees to my edits, resigns herself to the nature of such a piece.
I resolve to keep the original document.
- rachael 1-15-2002 11:30 pm