Reflections on a loaded brush (of paint)

When it comes to our skills and abilities as artists we often hear things like “I am just not talented.” or “I could never do what you do.” And while I am not the person to wax poetic about what skills are innate and which are those that are learned, it is an interesting thing to reflect on. Some skills come more naturally than others.

Recently while staying at a summer cottage I own jointly with my numerous siblings I came to look more closely than usual at some of the “art” on the walls, much of it belonging to me, but some hanging since the earliest days of our family inhabiting this space. A compact footprint of a log cabin which my father built only with the assistance of my older brothers, uncles and grandfather, decades ago but yet I have some memories of this time. This summer one morning I looked up from the bed at the two paintings my father completed the year he succumbed to cancer, only months after the relative ‘completion’ of this cabin. Because I was only six at the time I have no understanding whether he knew he had a terminal illness when he set out to build this cabin in the woods on a small beautiful body of water. I honestly don’t know If he was pursuing a dream of his own, or if he was doing it to fulfill a dream for my mother or if he foresaw a legacy for his six children to enjoy long after he was gone. I don’t know and at this point there is no need to know.

In any case as I studied the surface of these warped paintings on paperboard surfaces, I saw something that struck me as familiar. I may not have registered this familiarity until after-the-fact when I came across the close up photos I took of the two paintings. One painting is of a heron, another an egret, the compositions not original, these are paintings from a kit. Yet these painted scenes reflect similar sightings we have from the dock there at the camp, complete with reflections of weeds and trees in the waves and lilies. I took some close photos because I was worried my sister’s steamer (for her clothes) was damaging or mildewing the surface. It was not - they are worse for the wear in that they are a bit warped from temperature and humidity swings and their oak frames cracking in the corners. These frames my father also made with the very same oak boards he crafted our home’s kitchen complete with fabricated copper ventilation hood which he also fabricated from sheet and instructions.

You see my father was material savvy. After studying and graduating from Worcester Commerce in 1936 he worked in machine shops, he had wanted to study engineering at WPI which at the time was unreachable for a family with immigrant parents. He had always loved photography, he bought his first camera in 1934. During the war his brothers had served and although he had two children at home he too wanted to serve his country. It was then he served in the Marines as a Military Police photographer during the occupation in Japan just after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the photographs I have in my possession are beautiful personal images of the women with their children during the reconstruction. He also had a painters eye.

First and foremost he was a maker. He enjoyed tinkering in a shop and learning new things. He also loved books. He believed whole heartedly that education and expanding our ideologies was important for society. We had encyclopedias, national geographic magazines, history, art and how to books on the shelves. He was curious, and that feels like a dying art in and of itself.

In our basement in central Massachusetts he had a workshop, and my mother had a beautifully crafted laundry room, complete with industrial roller iron and slate sink- these would be akin to their studios if they would have considered themselves artisans, which in some way they both were. My mother, sewed, baked, painted and or/ refinished wood surfaces, working on our home’s wood moulding or sometimes refinishing furniture or shutters. My dad taught his older sons and their friends how to develop film and fix lawn-mowers and cars. But my father was not afraid to “cheat” a little, get a leg up. By this I mean, when he wanted to build a camp and either knew internally or externally that he did not have much time, he bought a log cabin kit- so the house was delivered by truck- just in pieces. Construction was just a matter of time and following instructions. When he later wanted to paint (needing something to distract him in his weakened state when he was sick) he took up painting by number. Thus the quotation marks when I mentioned these “paintings.” But his own flourishes of brushstrokes or customizations are visible in his efforts and skilled results.

I have been talking around what my reflection is about here. What I saw when I circled back to the photos of the surface of these paintings- yes they are just paint by numbers, but I saw something familiar. These were painted 1971, I was merely six or possibly seven years old. I had spent precious few hours of my with my father in those fleeting years, so it is not that I had much time to have learned anything directly from him...Other than by proxy (what I feel to be akin to osmosis at a cellular level).

Five of seven days a week he was at work. I have maybe a few vague memories of holding his hand, being carried or sitting on his lap. In fact just a couple years ago I found a reel to reel recording and I heard his voice (and mine) for the first time (it felt) in my lifetime. It was so foreign to me the only thing I connected it to it was recordings of John F Kennedy’s voice on TV, with it’s thick recognizable Massachusetts accent. The short conversation he was recording with me was also very telling, his asking me what kind of things I liked- and funny enough I blurted out (at six!) “I love flowers” this was again so telling, so known to me, yet totally NEW! It was kind of shocking How was this love for flowers so in tact fully within me at age six. It only took me some 30 plus years to take a botany class. How soon is what we become evident within us? My love of plants (and drawing) has been a part of me all along.

So as I studied the surface of these two paint by numbers, I saw some 55 years later, a familiar way of mixing colors, of loading a brush with paint, applying it to a surface, that felt like my own. Is this something innate my father had, that then genetically or through osmosis became also my way of handling the same materials? So much is transferred with our DNA it is nothing short of both mystifying and somehow miraculous. I can see it now in my minds eye, his hands, my hands, the same, like time travel within my body. Gravitational waves colliding to bend space time. I only picked up oil paint and a brush for the first time at age eighteen in art school, I had not used it or mixed paint on a palette before my first class. In fact I went to art school early, before even graduating high school, now that I am recalling it I was only 17 at the time (due to Reagonomics - I applied to and was accepted to Clark U/WAM college over holiday break). In hindsight, painting actually came incredibly naturally to me.

So much of my life now is looking back over time. I see evidence of my father within me, not from knowing him, but being a part of him. His love for cut flowers around the house, writing neat lists of everything needing to be done, his photographs or the objects he made in metal, playing with copper-chasing & repoussé, fashioning brass into a lighthouse, his love of tools and mechanical drawing, his bookshelves and his sense of justice and fairness. I also remember learning that there was a book at our library that had a dedication plate to my father. I believe an entrepreneur Mr Borgarti who started Spag’s (famous if you are from central MA during that time), bought a book or World Paintings and dedicated it to my dad. Funny enough I later sold a painting (much too inexpensively) of Spag’s to Mr B around 1983. My dad also loved museums, he was a member of both the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Worcester Art Museum and my older siblings remember going to the museums with him. I don’t have those memories but think now he would be thrilled that I attended my first year and a half of college at the Worcester Art Museum and now I also boastfully have possession of a lifetime membership at the MFA Boston (my ID expires in 2099) because the museum has a piece of mine in their collection. I think as much as I owe much of what I know to my various teachers and mentors, I owe much of it to my DNA which I share with my father and of course my mother too.