I returned to painting thirteen years ago, a few months before my husband died suddenly. Those first paintings after a hiatus of many years except for doodling and children’s art projects were awkward and rough. As I look back on those efforts now I can see they were the beginnings of the direction I would take and that even from that nascent position I had a mission.
Those first paintings were of my family and friends, many of whom remain my subjects to this day. Most of the paintings were taken from vacation photographs first with my husband in the picture and then without him as my family continued on without him. The photographs were used as guides. In some of the paintings the oddness of our stances is real and in others I went beyond the simple picture without thinking except to get everything in but realizing as I worked that how we stood, how our arms draped about each other, our order of standing, our smiles all had significance.
Not long after his death we left our suburban home where none of us were ever very comfortable to move back into Philadelphia. I bought a house in Bella Vista set among older row homes whose residents had either been here for generations or young transients living in houses broken up into apartments. It is the same street where my great grandmother had lived.
One of the first jobs I had was baking desserts for a small restaurant. It wasn’t full time but something to fit my time as I settled in. From that I started meeting people in the restaurant industry. I also had a friend who was a hair stylist and from him met others cutting hair. I mention this because many of them were starting to tattoo themselves. I was fascinated by the color and design or configuration and was constantly asking for why they inked a particular something on their arm or leg. As they became more colored, my own fascination grew.
The painting of these women began with Emily. I am always trying to reconcile the innocence and pureness of her face with the fierceness of the tattoos, which began on her arms and continued to her legs and then her back. I asked if I could take a picture. And then I asked if she would sit for me. And I started painting. At first it was more an artistic expression and the full meaning of why I wanted to paint women with tattoos wasn’t there for me yet.
Then my middle son became very ill and almost died. He was not well for a number of years and from his illness his unblemished flesh was suddenly scarred in a way that couldn’t be hidden. As a mother, your children’s scars can become as etched and grooved into your being as deeply and poignantly as for your suffering child. I suffered for both of us, though my own suffering was tamped down with the effort of caring for him. Perhaps it was sitting in the hospital one day with a sketchbook in my lap, I don’t remember, I’d like to make it some romantic moment, but I thought of all the tattoos of my own life inside of me, the pains and disappointments, the loss of a brother and then my mother, my husband and then I considered the joys, the accomplishments. I don’t have the bravery to wear my life on my body, to be a human totem pole. The fact is I am a private person and work in a studio alone. But for these women around me who told their own true stories as they explained what was on their bodies, I have tremendous respect for their honesty and how beautifully they have turned their flesh into art, their experiences of life as they saw it and understood it at that moment into a majestic statement that will live indelibly on their flesh even when inevitably shadowed or faded by their own aging.
In these paintings I worked from selfies Emily took over a number of years. These are her tattoos though I took the liberty of changing their positions or coloring. In a way you can say what I’ve done is the art of other’s art, since tattooing is art.