Brush with Disorder

Disorder. You know . . . chaos.

--Maybe you're just confused. Look, let's get the facts down.

To an old farmhouse
--Where?

Just east of Cobourg. But I've always been a city person, and the connections remain. My daughters, my family, friends, entertainment, shopping... On the other hand, just the other day, I dreamt that a cow from the farm down the hill wandered up and headed straight for our house. It stood outside our window and stared at us while we drank our morning coffee. I felt as if a whole other way of life had come to welcome us.
Previous shows?
Well, there were seven years of one-woman shows with the Estée Gallery and the show in Vienna in 1977. Then there was all that publicity with the City Woman magazine. Then, shortly after my last show in 1981, Leo and Estée Klausner decided to close their gallery -- for personal reasons.

--So your last show was over eight years ago!

Yes, that's right

--Do you care to explain?

Pardon?

--What have you been doing for the past eight years?

Do we have to get into this?

--I'm afraid an explanation is necessary -- under the circumstances.

Under the circumstances? Oh, I see. Well...uh.., .all right. But I warn you, it gets personal.

--That's O.K.

In that case, maybe I should begin with the Black --

Say, who's asking these questions anyway?

The Black Ages
Too late. My thoughts have taken me down to my personal Black Ages. They began with the breakdown of my marriage. then proceeded with the breakdown of my personality, which I'd long suspected needed to be taken apart before it could be joined together more serviceably.

The horror of the 'heart of darkness' hit me heavily at the time. I was drawn to accounts of torture and calamity, read anything I came across about the death camps and other atrocities in the last war. I went to Apocalypse Now on the large screen at Ontario Place. Perhaps I had wanted to see how a director like Coppola visualized man at his lowest point, his most depraved. I sensed that I needed to be tougher to survive. I wanted to see and read the worst. (The worst, in film, for me, actually came in The Killing Fields; in recent literature, in segments of The White Hotel and Obasan.) Anyway, Kurtz's motivation in Apocalypse Now had been to toughen himself so he could withstand anything without showing weakness. Was that what I wanted? No. Kurtz was an example of how intellect without feeling can concoct a kind of hell.

I wanted a toughness that would still accommodate compassion and vulnerability to other people's pain.

I brooded a lot over the question of guilt. I personally felt guilty of everything. My fault that my marriage failed. My fault that I was disintegrating. My fault that the world was full of war, cancer, diabetes. And especially: my fault that I was pursuing something as selfish as art. I've no idea why there was so much guilt and why so much of it fell on my shoulders.

At the bottom of it there must have been some preposterous conceit, as if I were someone with godly powers but had lost them through carelessness, and was guilty of that, too.

--So, what's this got to do with your painting?

Well...everything, I think.

--Couldn't you talk a bit about your movement away from the clear outlines of your earlier figures? About the new texture of your 'blotchy' skies -- sort of a macro-pointillism? About your increasing use of distortion? That bather's neck, for example. Do you think neo-post-structuralism is dead?

I'm not very comfortable with that sort of talk. Why does a viewer care about the backstage technique? I'm trying to tell you what affected my painting and what I'm attempting to express with it now

--And this stuff about guilt is relevant?

Yes, I think so.

For one thing, during the Dark Ages I doubted not only whether I had the talent and strength, but also whether I had the right to try to be an artist. The doubt added to the more general fear because I'd already invested so much, yet the goal still seemed so far away. A close friend mused one day that if I'd gone to law school instead, I'd have been a lawyer and making a lot of money. It's hard to work with conviction when you think that other people might be seeing your situation more clearly than yourself. A mere suggestion registers like a condemnation of what you're doing.

But it wasn't just the Black Ages inside, it was (and is) the ones outside too.

--Outside?

Our symbols are polluted
My mother-in-law said to me the other day, "I used to write poetry but all my symbols became polluted." That pretty well describes the starting point for any artist today: all our symbols have become polluted. The purity of the human soul, the beauty of our land and seas and skies -- well they're all obscured by the knowledge of the dark heart inside us. But ever since World War II, especially after the revelations of Auschwitz, the dark side has been out of the bag. After the photos of gas-ovens and corpses and living skeletons were made public, what could an artist say that was more revealing?

--Well?

I'm not sure. That there's still something worth saving? That beauty and even innocence still exist? There's no Pollyanna message, nothing to be overly optimistic about. But just as artists must look unflinchingly at the current crisis of our planet, and the human ambitions that have led us to it, so they must keep their eyes also on what is to be saved, what has been lost but might be retrieved. In our aspirations, we haven't found anything to replace love, beauty and honesty.

--Oh come on, Virginia!

Yes I know. When we talk about things like that, we usually preface our thoughts with an apology for our naivety in still believing in them. I feel like apologizing now. But maybe that sort of naivety is our last stronghold.

I look at the young people today, my own children and those younger. There seems to be nothing that unites them (other than music). The media still harps on the meaningfulness of the 60s. There's even a theory around suggesting the 'end of history': everything interesting has already happened, and the world is about to sink into boredom and sadness. Art and philosophy will be replaced by the endless task of conserving the museum of human history. It's reminiscent of a scientific view at the end of the 19th century that everything important had already been discovered. This on the eve of relativity theory and quantum physics!

I want to shout out to the kids: Wake up! You are it! You're the very reason for the future, and you're being sacrificed! It seems a colossal irony that so many are losing themselves and dying of drug abuse when they should be united in the demand for a future -- for a healthy planet.

Why Paint?
--Why paint?

The question often pops into my head during the long drives back to Cobourg after a day visiting my daughter in Toronto.

--And the answer?

There seem to be as many answers as there are points of light in the darkness ahead. As soon as one is reached, it no longer seems to be the relevant one. What's more, the answers range from the serious to the silly, with pompous somewhere in between.

An example of the serious-verging-on-pompous (having raised a question of what's worth saving): Art at its best symbolizes the human imagination, our most valuable natural resource. Yes, it helped get us into our mess, but surely we'll need it to get us out of it. The process of art-making and art-appreciation presupposes an interest in aesthetic balance, relevance, humour, compassion . . . Sorry! As I say, it does come out a bit lofty: a vote for art is a vote for the continuation of imagination.

Geurrilla Tactics?
--Why paint?

Because my father made sure he always had the last word -- by leaving the room as he spoke it, and as he did, shutting the door behind him. In self-defence I devalued the importance of the word. A visual image, on the other hand, once seen cannot be unseen. It sticks to your brain like a burr.

Painting as a guerrilla tactic.

Back to the Black Ages
There was one thing compared to which my guilt was a minor problem. And that was my fear that I was disintegrating. Becoming nothing. Sometimes the feeling of disintegration was so intense it took all my powers of concentration to hook my mind onto something stable, whether it was the rim of the lamp before falling asleep, or a volume of Toynbee's A Study of History.

--This was to help you paint?

I began to write poetry. I became a child and humbly started at the beginning, both in writing and in painting.

Disintegration anxiety
Only a few days ago, I came across the term "disintegration anxiety" in Anthony Storr's new book Solitude. It's a concept developed recently by Heintz Kohut. I said to myself: At last! That's me! That's the very word I've used in my diary.

The individuals liable to this kind of anxiety are those who in childhood lacked realistic, empathic responses from their parents. Storr writes:

One might compare Kohut's conception with looking in a mirror. A clear, clean, polished mirror will repeatedly reflect the developing picture as he actually is and thus give him a firm and true sense of his own identity. A cracked, dirty, smeared mirror will reflect an incomplete, obscure image which provides the child with an inaccurate and distorted picture of himself.

--That's why you like distortion?

No. I don't like it. It's that it's the condition of a modern or post-modern human being. As Eliot put it, our old culture is a "heap of broken images". But how can one ask for a clear reflection from parents whose own mirrors have been smashed to pieces?

From the perspective of creativity, Storr continues, people suffering from this disorder, possibly because of the "awareness of the potential chaos within", often have a "compulsive drive to discover order, coherence, and sense by means of abstract thought" -- this search indeed being what gives meaning to their lives.

Vertigo
I tried to capture my feelings of disintegration in a recent poem. In this excerpt a woman sits on a rock on one of the Thousand Islands. She wonders whether she should jump and become a part of the river:

	but I have no roots   not even skin
					to contain me
	white pines rise up from below   I look
	out over their tops   measure the danger facing me
	movement   anywhere    seduces me to follow
	on the backs of butterflies   flirting with
	the outstretched arms of pines
	I disappear behind other islands
	high over the water
`					and scattered
	I am vanishingly thin and the river
	infiltrates me like hot brandy

	I cannot tell which way it flows
	cannot remember the faces of my children
	or the sensation of standing on two legs
	or the name of a single dimension
	I want to scream
	bring attention to one woman who cannot
	pinpoint her location on any grid    She needs
	other eyes to fix her

Lighten up!
In retrospect, it's not surprising that I chose at that time to switch to oils (from acrylics) and try my hand at something as stable as realism.

--Ah, the end of disorder?

No, but a new way of coping with it.

I'd seen a show in New York by a group from England calling themselves Superhumanists. Like the pop music coming out of England at the time (early eighties) it was playful and witty. Its message (like Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume) was: Lighten up! It seemed one didn't have to die of a dark heart. One could even poke fun at it.

The message wouldn't have impressed me if at the same time they weren't dealing head on with social issues. I was stunned by the music of Pink Floyd in "The Wall", their way of addressing the effects of war on children, 'adult lies', problems of education, drugs, and their connection with music. I still get a chill down my spine listening to the plaintive, accusing wail: "Daddy, whatcha leave behind for me?!"

It brought me closer to understanding my own pain.

		and you feel shame and shame and shame
	until at last you can't take it
	and you swing around, temper rising
	and what do you see?
	a small being, so little and so afraid
	clutching its little bag of memories:
	this was done to me
	he did this to me

	all of which makes you weep
	and a voice says: let it go

Diary entry, July, 1989
Thinking about the upcoming family reunion for my mother's 80th birthday... Such violence inside. At the root there is again the threat of disintegration. And it's accompanied by shame that I've not done better at subduing the pain. Shame that I am bringing attention to it again, that I have no right to it. I did not suffer as others did in the war. As my father did. Again I'm caught in the vortex of guilt. Guilt also that I can still lose myself in this way when there are people who love me.

So what am I to say on my mother's 80th birthday? That I've not yet found the grace to accept everything the way it is? That sometimes I'm still stuck in my father's sadness and cry for it? She does not cry for her own. She has endured, and remarkably, is still growing and deepening in her outlook.

Role models in literature
I once confided to a friend that all my ideas about the ways one can live a life, love, nurture friendships, and arrange one's environment to be beautiful came from literature. She said her husband had told her precisely the same thing. He thanked God for literature or he simply wouldn't know how to live. (Today he's a professor of English literature.)

Why paint?
Face to face with a work of art, you encounter ;your limitations, whether in your actual experience, or in how deeply you've allowed yourself to feel them. Art invites you to expand.

		the minute you're awake
				you've got to choose
		opinions ripple like a minefield of tulips
		you need a clear head
		just to tiptoe

		the one real question:
		to expand
		or contract?
				after all
		some opinions are more expansive than others
		like if the world is flat
		you restrict your travels
		but if the world is round...

BLack Ages in a basement
I found a basement studio downtown and every week-day and often on week-ends (my daughters spent weekends with their father) sat down either at the typewriter or at the easel to work.

I worked on commissions for family portraits, I read a lot, slept a lot, drank a lot of wine, took a lot of walks through the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery where I admired the English tenacity for order, father's headstone on the left, mother's on the right, daughters' names listed below or to the right of mother's, sons' names below or to the left of father's.

To be fair, those days were not all black. I remember seeing a movie about Copernicus. The picture opened in a courtyard of a monastery in the 'Dark Ages' and I was dazzled by the bright sunlight and the young faces of the monks. I was so startled I began to laugh.

--Is that laughter in your paintings too?

Maybe not yet. But in my life.

Because there was light, love and friendship in my life too. My daughters, Valerie and Paula, of course. I was never so stable as in their company.

There was also the upstairs to the studio I rented. Frauke Voss, an artist who makes sculpture out of fibre, was always at work when I went past her to make coffee in the kitchen she let me share. There was always another tenant or guest.

And there were journeys. The man I was living with was a talented traveler. We visited parts of Europe, South Africa (including his place of birth), the USSR, Estonia (my place of birth), South America.

But everywhere I went, the fear was with me, the awareness of an empty vortex at the centre of my space. Safety lay in keeping to the margins, which meant assuming a sort of crouched position.

Ophelia
I pondered about lost innocence and about the possibility of innocence in a world like ours. The world seemed so corrupt and, looking into myself, I had to say, 'no wonder'. I became fascinated by the figure of Ophelia. Partly because she epitomized the fate of innocence but also because she was, in literature, only a sketch, and hastily drawn at that. She was in constant danger of disintegrating. There were people like that among my friends, both men and women who were in such danger. Somehow they survived, though painfully sensitive, afraid to hurt anyone, confused by a society that exhorts them to be more aggressive, by feminist writers who recognize only a politicized world. Self-assertiveness classes were full. So were psychiatrists' offices.

It occurred to me that Ophelia didn't have it in here to take her own life, though I could visualize her lying down in the river and letting it take its course.

There may be no use for fragility or innocence in our world, but it doesn't simply go away. It keeps on trying. I see Ophelia as a figure who never really drowns, but keeps resurfacing through the centuries, whether in paintings or in literature, checking to see whether the air has become safe for her to breathe. Perhaps such innocence is beautiful only in the young. I know a man who no longer listens to his favourite music because he doesn't know what to do with the feelings aroused in him. On the other hand, he knows he'd be greatly impoverished if it didn't exist.

--Is that Ophelia over there?

Almost transparent in "The twenty-ninth Day"?

--And again in "Hansel and Gretel"?

Yes. But they came later.

First of all from these musings came the painting "Trust Me", a painting of a young woman walking on eggs while a white hen looks on.

With our eyes wide open
Instead, one particularly black night, when the political world (the Iran/Iraq war was still raging; children were being sent to the front lines wearing gold keys to Paradise around their necks) and my interior world were in sync, I started over. It seemed to me that as nations or as individuals we keep marching through history repeating the same stupid mistakes based on the same greedy motives. I felt such sharp anguish that I had to do something quickly. I took the only primed canvas I had (which happen to be 6' x 6'), took the figure from "Trust Me" and copied it four times onto the canvas.

All this I did with great speed and anger, pausing only to blow my nose and sweep aside the tears which kept coming. To my mind, the painting contains my one and only self-portrait. A year later I painted out the strange dresses I had put on the figures [out-date-photograph does not reflect this -- up-dated image coming], and also, at the advice of a friend, the big black letters at the bottom, WITH OUT EYES WIDE OPEN, (which remains, however, its title.)

--Disorder again?

Yes. It was hard to go back to the more painstaking realism. But there were commissions to complete. In any case, I couldn't look at the new painting. For over two years it sat face to the wall in the studio.

It was when I re-married and took all my possessions to a new apartment that I rediscovered it. The blackness of the past was fading and I could accept the painting as a valid starting point for my future work. I was, once again, at the beginning.

A new Intimacy
But with a difference. I had changed. Doing art, working with paint, ideas, the process had become more dear to me, more intimate. The intimacy started, I think, when I began to use my fingers to push the paint around. It was direct and naked and I liked what happened.

Even the inner turmoil seemed more intimate. One friend passed on to me the cryptic advice: stay with the confusion. Another friend taught me that confusion is a legitimate state of mind.

I recognized that the chaos and potential disintegration were not forces that stood in the way of my life. Rather, they were the conditions under which it had to be lived.

Another beginning
Shana Laing and Garo Altinian remembered my work from the earlier shows and wondered if I was interested in working through their gallery in Montreal. They visited me in my new apartment where I'd been working on a few new pieces and their response to them, and especially to 'With Our Eyes Wide Open", was very encouraging.

It was at the Altinian-Laing gallery that Lillian Chow of Galerie Beaux Arts in Toronto saw my work. By then my husband and I had moved to Cobourg into an old Century home (every crack attests to its age) with an adjacent bungalow, which is now my studio. One day our phone rang. It was Lillian. Was I interested in being represented by a gallery in Toronto? she asked.

So I met with her and her partner, Ethel Sum, in Toronto. I was attracted to both of them immediately.

--And?

Diary entry, June, 1989

		hip hop clippety hip
		this horse is going nowhere
		thrash it, mash it
		beat it till it's silly
		but it just won't go

My work has come to a grinding halt and I'm unhappy. Sometimes as a painting progresses it amasses a solidity which feels like a betrayal of the first tentative strokes. I feel empty-handed and bewildered.

I'm sitting in the garden with Rod. Our puppy, Zeph, is in the shade of my chair. We hear the train whistle in the distance. On still days like this, you can hear the wheels on the tracks. This train is eastbound.

It's impossible to paint with conviction at those times that I don't have a deeper acceptance of myself. I don't claim to understand the embarrassment I still feel sometimes about my work, but I understand it's something I must get rid of.

It takes time to undo the patterns of the past. I talk about this with Rod because I need to find some metaphor that will help me through this transition. We talk and talk until at last we find one: I have been walking with certain contortions in my body for so long that now, as I'm trying to walk straight, I experience all sorts of resistance. But I won't go back to the crouched position in the margins.

Guilt and moral ease
Anne Truitt writes in her Daybook:

If the artist is not at moral ease, energy goes into conscious or unconscious rationalizations that are betrayed in an inability to maintain a consistent philosophical key. This failure, however subtle, undermines the trust implicit in the placement of oneself in an artist'a hands...

I take this to mean that if you're not comfortable in yourself -- and it's a matter of acceptance, not perfection -- then it's possible that some part of you is dragging its heels, resisting because it has a hidden agenda, and will undermine subtly, or sidetrack the thrust of your work by winking at your audience.

Truitt identifies guilt as one of the enemies of moral ease.

It helps me to know, for certain, that guilt is irrelevant, unwanted, harmful to my work.

Responsibility
A part of 'walking straight', without contortions, is accepting the responsibility involved in art-making.

I'm reminded of an ancient incident that used to make me blush. At summer camp -- I must have been thirteen or fourteen -- I liked to find a solitary place and sketch.

--Lakes and rocks and trees?

No, even back then, my favourite subject was the human body and I sketched from life or from memory. One day I found I was surrounded by the most popular boys in my age group. They were watching as I drew. Suddenly I was hotly aware that my figures were female and nude, but I was determined not to show my self-consciousness just because my private world had been discovered. Art was art and that was that. No one laughed. Occasionally someone asked how it would affect the rest of the body if an arm were raised this way or the head were turned that way. I explored the suggestions, fully aware that we were somewhat unnatural conspirators.

I've often wondered why the memory made me blush. I used to think it was because I played into their hands. But in retrospect, there was such silence around me that perhaps they were earnestly respectful of a realm in which the female figure could be legitimately admired and explored. The problem was with myself -- my enjoyment of the power I felt. It seemed wrongly earned because I had neither breasts nor hips.

However, it was a most fundamental lesson in responsibility: the motives of a would-be artist must relate to the natural progressions and demands of the work at hand, not to the perceived interests of others. I never drew in public again.

My critic angel
A critic-angel, is, simply, a force that blocks your way. And it does so in a seemingly simple manner: all it want is for you to define yourself. I am ______. Perhaps for some people it's a simple matter to fill in the blank. Personally I find it unnerving to be confined to any definition. With one definition a person becomes one dimension, one dot, and that dot, it seems to me, is too easy to discount or obliterate. There is also a residual 'child of war' syndrome in me. I sued to believe that the reason I was alive was because by some oversight, no one had chosen to snuff me out. Best to be unnoticed, unlocated, undefined. It follows that anyone who wants you to define yourself cannot be trusted.

		today I want proof that we cannot be
		reduced to anything comprehensible
		that we are like the readiness of rivers
		ready				to flow

Why paint?
To escape the constraints of definition.

"Real" meaning has no meaning
In his provocative book, The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky writes:

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it all to other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the 'real meaning' of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

Kundera deals with a parallel thought. There's an expression in German, "Einmal ist keinmal." Kundera raises the question that if we have a chance to live our lives only once, unprepared, unrehearsed, what meaning can this single life have?

Perhaps that's why people are attracted to causes and quests: to repeat what others have done or are doing adds a resonance of numbers: you are subsuming the meaning of other peoples' lives under the title of your own.

Still, I think the best way is to avoid the narrowing vice of definition. After all, isn't the greatest put-down a facile summing ;up of another human being with one pat phrase ('he's nothing but...' or 'she's just...')?

Art works with imagery, metaphor, signs, any tricks that avoid limitation: it's better to be lost in meanings that to be too narrowly confined.

I write to define myself: I paint to escape definition
My critic-angel is smirking. He knows that to have no definition is to be nothing at all. Without anything to define us we are left free as the air to blow off in any direction. Tumbleweed. And that's when I understand why I've come to terms with words. I write to define myself. I paint to escape definition and embrace a multiplicity of meaning. It's a purely personal matter and for someone else it may be the reverse.

Immediately I doubt such a locating statement. A modification is in order: I write essays to define myself. Perhaps what I'm attracted in both a picture and a poem is the tension between the finite and the infinite.

Marvin Minsky again:

True, too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected meaning structures let you turn ideas around in your mind, to consider alternatives and envision things from many perspectives...And that's what we mean by thinking!

Diary entry
This I know, as I stand by the window looking down at the garden: there have been wise people around me. I never noticed them, and they have no faces, but I hear their reticence, their sparseness of words, their long silences, their awe of life as it presents itself.

Some of these people I might still meet someday. Some of them have been artists and are dead, but sometimes I've found myself standing in front of their work.

Years ago, in the Tate Gallery in London, I glimpsed a painting by Munch from the corner of my eye. It was one of a sickroom in which a child (his sister) is dying and her mother is by her side, head bowed. All the time I knew the painting was there. I circled around it, my back to it, looking at all the other paintings in the room. When it was directly behind me, I slowly turned around. I experienced at that instant what Anne Truitt has called "the spontaneous rise of my whole being". Moments of such receptivity to quality have been rare in my life. I'm familiar with the motions, the circling, the expectation, but rarely is the craving for the sublime satisfied, as it was that time. I don't know where the fault lies, whether with later works or with me. But the desire to be moved is still intact.

More recently, some paintings by Kitaj have moved me to reverent silence. Unfortunately, I've seen those works only in books. Someday I hope to see a live exhibition.

The list of painters I admire is long, but Kitaj is the latest discovery. Perhaps this is not the place to explain how his work inspires me. And intimidates. Sometimes I feel he's said all there is to say about corruption, moral bankruptcy. And his more intimate pastel drawings express and emotional stance very familiar to me. Awareness of his work has helped me define my own 'territory', so to speak. If the central condition of his life was what happened to the European Jew, the central condition of mine is the endless wandering of displaced people. There are more today around the world than ever before in history. The other half of it is the hunger to exist.

Why paint?
To borrow, with considerable distortion through omission, from Flaubert: "...to move the stars to pity."

Back to Beaux Arts
--Is that the end of your story?

Yes, such as it is. Rambling. And still incomplete.

--But anyway you're ready to show your work publicly again?

Oh yes. Of all your questions I can at least answer that one. I thought I had been answering it.

--And the answer is . . .?

Life without guilt
I concentrate on what is now, on this moment, which is fresh and free for the taking, without guilt attached. A minuscule insect crawls up my leg, its path a silk thread of sensation. I hear the sound of dry twigs snapping. I saw them earlier, the cows that move slowly and heavily through the underbrush of the woods that border on our property. The drone of a small plane approaches us. Overhead, sound splits into layers, each one louder than the first. Two white butterflies dance and part. One flits to the sunflower patch, the other to the wallflowers. The heat of the sun is beginning to press down on me, and then an unexpected breeze descends from the tops of the poplars and takes it away.

A fly sticks to my leg. I brush it away. In a moment it's back. I brush it away.

....................................................................Copyright 1990 Merike Lugus

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Last updated Jul 11/97

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