Copyright © 1999, 2009 Hillary Johnson
All Rights Reserved
Not to be Reproduced Without Permission from the Author
My mother, Ruth Jones, was an artist, a maker of intaglio prints. After her death in 1993, I took a course in printmaking to make images from the few remaining zinc and copper plates I found in her studio, plates she had etched fifteen years earlier. My instructor, V.J. Kumar, a master printmaker from Pratt Institute, didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t doing my own work. Indeed, after he had carefully wiped the excess ink from one of my mother’s plates with the heel of his bare hand—I always slathered on too much—and sent it through the press, his fascination was obvious. Sometimes my fellow students circled round to examine the new print. With V.J. presiding, they would ponder how my mother had achieved a particular effect, or speculate about the meaning that hovered just below the sometimes cartoonish playfulness.
My pleasure ran deep during these informal critiques, yet I stood by silently. I looked at the images with a mix of recognition, longing and delight. Seeing the art as my mother had meant it to be seen was like hearing her speak to me in a language that has yet to be recorded.
Today I gaze at her creations—of wise old cats with Chesire smiles, of uncomplaining sheep stacked one upon the other like so many soda bottles, of grazing cows engaged in a comic struggle for hegemony—and I am struck by her sympathetic, if winking, view of humanity. When I am beset by moodiness, I need only raise my eyes to meet those of one of my mother’s strangely comical creatures, its expression suggesting it is about to tell a bawdy joke, its posture suggesting it has weathered all sorts of difficulties and soldiered on.
Ruth was drawn to successively complicated stages of creation, and, in retrospect, it is unsurprising that printmaking—with its infinite permutations—would raise her sights and inspire her highest ambitions. Etching the image onto a metal plate was only the first of many steps in the process. As I would learn from V.J., between the idea and the finished art lay not just conventions to be followed but possibilities for ingenuity and experiment at every point. No two prints could ever be the same. Surely, as far as Ruth was concerned, that was the beauty part, that was the art of printmaking.
From my earliest memories, I recognized my mother as an original spirit, though I didn’t always think of her as an artist. Our family of four lived in Minneapolis, where a woman like my mother stood out in the 1950s. She was a housewife, but unlike the sitcom icons of the era, she was sexy and eloquent and well-read; she had a sharp wit and an eye for the rare and the whimsical. When I was three, and she and my father were in the midst of an unhappy period in their marriage, she left a note on the breakfast table for my father to read: “Gone to Paris, took the kids.” My mother, brother and I were abroad for a year. Beginning in her thirties, after my parents’ divorce, she bought paintings and prints whenever she could, in spite of ever-looming debt. Often, she arranged installment deals with the artists.
Her transition from art consumer to artist was gradual, so gradual I barely noticed. As she grew increasingly accomplished, my inability to recognize the transformation could be compared to that particular form of blindness in which peripheral vision remains intact but the sufferer cannot see what is directly in front of her. Out of habit, I viewed her lastest undertaking as neither more nor less important than her interest in preparing a French meal or tearing out an interior wall of the house to enlarge a room.
My mother took my indifference in stride. She pressed on, following her muse, working hard to discover precisely what she wanted to say as an artist, and experimenting with ways to say it. It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties, and my mother was terminally ill, that I began to understand that her art was serious business, that it was a career that had emerged in tandem with my own as a journalist and was of as much importance to her as mine was to me.
Over the course of her printmaking years, she gave most of her art away to those among her professors, classmates and friends who admired it. Her art was part of another economy, one more sacred than barter. It was an expression of her love. She made art precisely so that she could give it away.
A few years before my mother died, she stopped making prints. She sold her press and threw away most of what remained of her work, very much as if she was tying up loose ends. With her blessing one summer day, I searched the studio where she had sketched and dreamed and ultimately created so many of her beautiful pieces. I was hoping to salvage some remnant of her work. In addition to a handful of dusty plates, I found a few paintings fragile with age, and a succession of scuffed-up prints, all of them rolled together in a cardboard tube and lying behind some shelving. I discovered two idly-drawn ink sketches still in their wire-bound sketchbooks. I sighted a tiny square of paper, the size of my palm, on the floor. When I turned it over, I saw a delicate etching of a nude in happy repose attended by three eager-looking mice. In the world of my mother’s art, I was to learn, people and animals exist in a kind of fraternal harmony, virtually interchangeable, and often equally benighted.
Eventually, with the passion of an entomologist preserving specimens of an exquisitely beautiful species of butterfly, I framed the pieces I had found. Over time, as surely as if she herself had extended her hand, Ruth’s art led me into the psychological landscape of someone who, by coincidence, also happened to be my mother.
Ruth had no diamond pendants or silver place settings to offer by way of a bequest, but I realize now that my mother left behind a legacy of immense value.
Her art was a tactile, visual record of her personal style and strength of will, of her relentless search for beauty and meaning in her life.
The rooms of my house are sparsely furnished, but its walls seem almost lavish with my mother’s art. Her images offer condolence, they embolden me, they quiz me, just as she once did. “Here, my darling girl,” a piece of her art might suggest to me, “look at this funny cat. See how very droll it is. This cat has known sadness, that is true. But look again. The cat is very clever. It is undefeated. It harbors a great secret. What is that secret?”
Since college, I had spoken to my mother by telephone nearly every day, from wherever I might be. The days had turned into years, the years into decades. The great dialogue of my life, with its attendant comfort and humor and insightfulness, came to an abrupt end when she died. Or so I believed. The conversation started all over again when I began to study the prints she had made.
Pink Cat
Menage a Cing
