my blue kitchen

Poor Mom. I spent an unexpectedly cool and overcast Sunday last week working on her portrait. We've been having a bit of a go at each other for months now.

The problem is that I can't seem to capture a particular quality in her smile. Most (real) artists tend to avoid overt, opened mouthed grins, the kind best left captured in photographs, and for good reason ~ that split second of joy so easily caught by pixel or film can, in the hands of the wrong person, become a frozen, deadened grimace on canvas.

These are the hands of the wrong person.

Working from a recent photograph and determined to preserve a certain sweetness in her countenance (there was more there, but I started the picture in the first throws of grief, and must be forgiven an element of sentimentality) I painted her at first beaming broadly. Too broadly, I'm afraid, because the longer I worked the more her expression took on a somewhat demented aspect. By which I mean she looked crazy.

So I painted her mouth a little softer. Too softly, because in time I came to realize that she looked a little wistful. By which I mean she looked depressed. And who wants to go through that for eternity?

And on it went ~ loony laugh/woeful pout. Smooshy paint. And I began to wonder if this is less about me as an unskilled painter (although it is certainly that) and more about me trying to create a form of everlasting life for my mother. I want to paint her into an eternity of smiling bliss; to guarantee her happiness with gay dashes of red and yellow, banishing forever all the subtler hues of indigo and grey that too were a part of her life; all of our lives, in fact, and that need to be acknowledged, with all their implied whispers of mourning and regret.

I know that to deny this is neither sensible nor desired. I know that this is what makes makes portraits devoid of life and passion; it is what separates the kitsch from the real. And she would want it all out there. But I seem to want to make it prettier. Better. For me.

Then again, maybe this is just how I choose to remember her. Pink. Bright. Happy.

And so it goes ~ week after week of painting mom's smile in and out until, somewhere in this alternative universe, she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Somewhere, I have finally managed to make my mother bipolar.

At last I put Mom aside and finished a little picture I'd started well over a year ago (2? 3?) ~ meant to be a quick, cheerful study of the kitchen table where an old friend and I had once sat on a cool gray winter afternoon, drinking wine and nibbling bits of fruit and cheese. Catching up on lives once close, but now lived 3000 miles apart.

So much for quick. But it is cheerful. A little cartoon-y. I don't mind. It will always remind me of my friend and how warm we felt sharing that cozy winter day. Mercifully, the smiles need only be implied.