‘What it means when your mother is an artist’ by Tilly Nevin

Disegnia antonio disegnia antonio / disegnia e non perdere tempo
draw antonio draw antonio / draw and don’t waste time – 
Michelangelo

i. Young girl at an easel, 60x60, oil on canvas. (A sketch of your past.)

When she was ten she sat at the kitchen table late one night, clock-time late, so late that even her reluctant brothers were asleep upstairs, but not late enough for her mother to be home yet, and she wrote him a letter. I want to be a painter, she said. The moonlight spilled over the page like a glass of milk some child had knocked with their wrist, all bone and lonely titanium white. He replied, a week later. She saved the envelope all day, until she had gone back and forth from school, and when she opened it, lettered in capitals, he had written: DRAW, DRAW, DRAW. GO TO ART SCHOOL. She read it so many times that the words lost all meaning, like the Latin she once learnt and which, repeatedly, the summer stammered away. Like the language her father spoke, how his vowels tasted like green apples and like the bitterest dregs of coffee when he called her beautiful. It was easy to do as the artist said. She had all the time in the world. Most people in her life had pockets of it they rooted around in for short change, but she had all the evening after she had put her brothers to bed, the hours before her mother pulled back into the drive, the time at school when no one talked to her, all the times she forgot to eat, and the space in the seclusion of her bedroom when everyone thought she was sleeping. She could not sleep. When she wrote to him, she had not done for so many months that it felt like years had passed and perhaps they had. Perhaps, she thought, this is how the rest of my life will pass; in days that never end. It was easy to do as the artist said, because no one was there to argue with her when she wanted to go to art school and when she sent off the applications herself, when she got herself to her interviews in a city she’d never been to before, and even when she almost cried in the cramped room facing two men who asked her questions and her answers sounded like a child’s, because she’d worn what she’d made herself, a jacket constructed from her father’s old shirt and patches she knitted one weekend, and pinstripe trousers she sewed from the lining of an old dress. Before her, spread out on the table like a limb they’d taken from her, were all the years of drawing.

All I remember from my childhood is drawing. No, that’s not quite true. But everything that happened, I drew, whether, in the end, it looked like the event or not, so that every memory from my childhood has its echo made concrete. It doesn’t matter so much whether you get the chin right, she used to say, before the language was robbed from her like another all those decades ago, only that you try. That you enjoy the effort. And I loved the grey line on the page, like the mist pulling in on the motorway just as you begin to drive away or the sky leaden before the rain, turpentine and charcoal waters. I don’t draw anymore, but like another language lived in her as she grew, it’s somewhere buried in me. I often surprised her by knowing how to mix that colour, with a vocabulary that I could never really lose, like illness carried down from generation to generation, like the lists of Spanish words my friend and I crammed before an exam. What I did lose: the ability to draw my path back to her. The ability to draw for her a way out. My new language is one she doesn’t share, paragraphs and iambic pentameter and plosives. One she cannot voice, and I’ve forgotten a time when she could. Even if I still share in hers, Dorothy Hale in mid-fall. What if Icarus’ act of hubris was just an act? I know how searing the sun-soared sky is. How sometimes the sea looks kinder. 

‘Does anyone know how you say “draw” in Italian?’ the professor asked. And from somewhere, like a plant that she placed in soil long ago and thought had never begun to grow and, going outside, is suddenly there, all bunched leaves like fists and foetuses, she heard herself say, ‘Disegnare. Disegno.’ The professor eyed her suspiciously, nodded. ‘Perfect,’ he said. Perfetto, she thought. Afterwards, her classmate asked her if she studied Italian at school or if she had done art history before. She wondered what to say; the history of art was in her blood, the blood of the covenant stronger than the water of the womb, in the letter he sent her, in all those hours she spent in a dark room holding a torch over the page, tracing her fingers in figure-eights round the shapes of saints in gold leaf and poppy red, studying the colours as if they had their own decipherable grammar, and Italian was hers, just a her that belonged to a different timeline. Her classmate was pulled away by the shout of another student before she could respond. He had not wanted the answer, anyways, only a means by which he could explain her unexpected knowledge to himself, reduce her from threat to something easily comprehensible. 

*

At art school, they assigned studios, and you had hers, though you didn’t know it until five weeks in to term. It didn’t scare you, her spectre. Your bank balance didn’t scare you either. You only needed painting; you only needed the silver taste of white spirits thick in the air like petrol and your hand holding a brush and the movement across a canvas. What did scare you: the theory you were assigned to read, how your tutors talked, all contorted vocabulary, and how you were still, even here, even with your people, alone, how the students around you seemed to find it all as natural as swimming. You almost drowned as a child, and he was there to fish you out, as the waters closed, still, above your head like you’d never broken the surface. At college, you knew, he wasn’t around anymore. Breathe under your arm, just above the water, he’d said, but you never mastered it. In the pool, you still gasped and floundered and the lifeguard’s eyes on you felt like the burn of cigarette butts on the skin, something sinister. Sinistra, another dead word like a pebble on your tongue, and you were just as off-kilter. I understand you, you thought, as maybe most others didn’t. She wasn’t anything to you but a creature in pain, painting it away. So you painted it all away, too. Her presence in the corner. The freezing cold clambering through the window like a winter vine because there was no heating there or in your room. Their words in class, a language you never learnt, not even one that just got locked away. How men stared at you on the tube and in the street and your skin grew hot. How you didn’t call home and how that word, too, turned to ash. You still didn’t sleep well, so you climbed up under your duvet and blanket and coat and jumpers and held your torch over her paintings on the page. Traced your fingertips around the faces of people in her paintings, faces that are hardly faces anymore, a tenderness you thought you had forgotten. She was mad too, you learnt, reading her journals: she saw children everywhere. The year of one hundred and forty nine children, she called it. She hid from them, round corners and in her bedroom, under the sheets. 

But she wrote too, that they brought her gifts: a key, ancient with rust and the rage of turning locks that don’t give. Another kitten, mewling its plaint like its ABCs or the Greek alphabet, just a little out of reach. A book without a cover, the binding still stitched tight as your ribs these days, so I don’t know what I’m reading until I’m reading. Starless nights and blue thunderstorms in the afternoons. Words and aching silences in the moment when the mouth is against the crease of the door, as the eye peers through the peephole, empty as a seashell. Leaves, skeleton and starved in the summer and green at the turn of spring and plum skin purple on wintry nights, among white stone and rivers rushing too high to not get lost in the way stars shatter over the surfaces and crows dive bomb their depths. Rings bent out of shape into the twist of a tiny cork screw.

And she painted what they left her. Detritus and desolation and detail. 

Femme qui veut parler Latin, she painted across the canvas, pour le mari, chagrin. The woman who wants, like you still hungered for a language, to speak aloud what was only a corpse. You were eaten up with the chagrin of others. There should have been nothing left of you to pick apart, like she embroidered onto the canvas what you should only see on the underside because you have split apart at the seams, like the dress you once stitched smaller and smaller. But something remains: uninvited eyes, like needles, tell you so. As well as the paintings, though, there are photographs of her laughing in the studio you worked in. So you tried to teach yourself how to laugh again like you were painting yourself back into the picture. You laughed with your neighbour, when you were the last two in the studio in the evening: you were always the last to leave and the first to arrive. You laughed in the pub, tentatively, when she invited you out with her friends, growing bolder. You laughed when they became your own. You laughed and it lost its forcedness, its edge: how English always felt like in your mouth. It took months, years, days that felt endless, and you still couldn’t speak some days and your voice was still a cuckoo in the nest, all bird bone. But I do not have all the time in the world, you told yourself, because she didn’t. So you laughed when that boy took your hand, because you liked his smile, and you painted so early in the morning when the baby was asleep that you heard the birds wake and when the frost crept into your studio so that the floor looked like marble, veins exposed, and the bones of your body, like someone’s reaching fingers, and everyone else was inside in the warm glow the fire threw out. The sentences still fractured and the sense disappeared from words you thought you knew, some days, but others were better. 

ii. Woman and child in the city. 2000. (A moment.) 

When I was young, you took me to the shop to buy supplies and we picked out pastels like they were seashells: a way of listening to the sea, to a world we could share and one we could never get close to.

My brother calls and tells me how she’s doing, tells me not to worry. I did my share, growing up, and it’s his turn now. It still feels like I forgot something. I cannot speak to her on the phone. We Skype and stare at each other across an ocean. I have not forgotten the names: cadmium orange, purple madder, purple lake and renaissance copper. I have seen a cadmium orange sun smear the sky around it until the clouds looked etched in renaissance copper. I have seen still lakes so dark that they could be purple, plums and blackberries overripe for the picking. I see her in everything. She holds up drawings, occasionally. I find whatever’s closest to me on my desk, paper or a napkin and I draw back, figures that look like a child’s. We are chiaroscuro, antithetical and inseparable. Our languages are obscure to each other and still I see through yours like the clear lakes back home. We are Vitruvian men, fingertips touching as we circle each other like dancers. 

*

She has not painted for three weeks. She cannot remember if she ate on any of those days. Her tutor’s words ring in her head, the hard words of her brothers like how the sole of a shoe sounds on the pavement when she ran, once, with them when they were young down a road so fast she thought she might fly. She cannot look at the painting he criticised in front of everyone, or any of the ones she’d done before, because they appear as strangers’ faces. People call, sounding more and more worried. On the last day of the month, her friend zips her up in a coat and helps her tie her shoes and takes her out, as if she’s a child going ice skating. It’s so cold they have to hold on to each other so they don’t fall. The friend takes her to a gallery and sits her on a bench in the main room, and she stays and shakes and the security guard stares. But, eventually, she sees, the woman she knows, surrounded by the children who followed her everywhere. She looks steadily at her. Her friend appears in front of her and presents her with a sketchpad and a pencil. ‘Draw,’ she says. 

I have you in my blood, like alcohol: even today, I woke up, a dream on the tip of my tongue of the painter you liked – Pollock, wasn’t it, but the other one? – like a word that lived. I walked to a gallery this afternoon, as the leaves turned like the dress on Flaming June, as rot begins to grow at their edges like a charcoal skirt, to look at someone’s painting of period blood. 

There is so much I want to tell you. So much I can’t draw.

If I was my mother, I would want to draw this woman. I cannot write her, not fully, not how the gold laced through her ears is more golden in the sun, or how her eyes are always laughing or how she speaks with her hands. I can’t get her chin right. I try to tell my mother about her over Skype, but the words cannot come. I try to tell her about how hard the classes are and how I miss everyone back home. I try to tell her that I want the old her back. How Mary Oliver reminds me of the painter whose house we visited, once, and how the body in the text contorts like it does in Chagall in blue and green like the smudged evening sky.

I ask her over and over, until it splits away, like sheep’s milk or dactyls, like hooves the tutor said, the horses on the mountain are just as dark and sleek as the comma on the page, how don’t you know? How did this happen? The language I will learn, I know, Polish on Mondays and German on Wednesday afternoons, won’t tell her, or me, any more clearly. 

I still speak your language. I am feverish with it. But I do not know, anymore, if you speak mine.

Still. How could I be angry, when you left me this? An eternal autumn and the way, when I look at peoples’ faces, I think how it would be to paint them, their smile and stance. To paint them in words is an art I learnt from you, though to you those words look like the marks of a paintbrush, too abstract to make out what they are, even if you stand at a distance.

When I left you, over and over, in speaking something you disremembered like the Italian of your childhood or last year’s summer until it arrived again. 

iii. The Leaving. Metal and copper and oil on canvas. 4205 x 2805 x 60 mm. (The size of the future.) 

She is in Italy, alone. She has arrived, travelled miles and used all the money she has, all for a painting. Madness. Her tutor gave her a list of galleries to go to, and this, the one she added, is the last. She has counted the oranges that are heavy on the trees here, like coins as large as her palm, and walked through cathedrals, breathing in oil paint like she’s in a studio, candles flickering like the priest’s voice, words she understands and some she doesn’t. She stands before it after all that, and she was worried it would not be all she remembers, not after citrus fruit red as bitten lips and peoples’ dark hair in the evening under lamplight. But the woman greets her like an old friend, and did her lips always tilt upwards at the corners like that? The painter looks at her steadily, considering. How many days has it been since she sent her letter? Maybe as long ago as this woman painted herself painting.

She will come back, one day, but not alone. Someone will take a picture of her next to the figure in the painting, their amber eyes together, as she leans against the open window, listening to the city’s sounds below her, the dark room still warm, soaked in lemon juice, and she will laugh as the woman in the painting keeps looking, face open, serious and divine. And one day, a daughter, maybe, will come here too, when a different type of madness takes its hold. That’s all in the future, though. For now, she sits cross legged on the floor in front of her painting and draws, because, after all, that is what the woman is telling her to do. To draw the world when it looks like it might fall apart around her and when sense no longer belongs to her. 

The train pulls away from the station and your heart lurches with each movement on the track, like it can’t decide whether to stay behind or go with you. You only have that picture; a woman in black as she once told you so many artists always are, smiling, leaning against a huge throw open window, a thousand times more beautiful than the painting on the wall beside her. She learnt languages, you exclaim to your friends, like it was as easy as breathing, joked that in a flight to Germany she’d have learnt as much as you learnt in your two months there. The language of the smile she found harder to master; it is never genuine in the few photos you have of her. This is the only one you’ve seen where she looks like she might have a reason to smile, her head tilted back as if she’s just been laughing. 

When they drove and she sat in the front seat, too young, he kept his hand across her, like an extra seatbelt, so if they were in a crash he’d try and defy gravity and velocity and stop her flying through the window. When you leave now, when you write, you are putting out your own hand to stop yourself freefalling. When you are on trains, you watch out the window and it is another window, ready to fracture, the disaster just a minute, a second away, round that next corner, round the road whose name you always liked, safe in a moment of suspension. But it is also the window she’s leaning against, the window she sat next to when that farmer offered her a desiccated raw onion, worried about a young girl alone far from home as she searched for another woman’s face, the window you stare out of when you have hung up after your Skype calls, and it’s the window you sit next to when, coiled tight like a spring in anticipation, you are on your way back to her. Slowly, your leaving and your writing, one and the same, become your window back and in every letter that you type, every word that you write, you see her half-silhouette, just as, sometimes, you catch a flicker of that other woman in the photograph like a flame in a church. In the end, the language you shared was always the same. I could not get up in the morning without painting, she says, and you hear in it the violent hunger for beauty, the beauty of your hands which, once, were hers.

From issue #9.5: spring/summer 2020

About the Author
Tilly Nevin is currently an MPhil student in Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge. You’ll find her writing short stories, contributing to The Attic on Eighth, wandering through cities and books, or on top of a Welsh mountain.