Derek Davidson
Medium
Start with blue, a cadmium wash spilling through Mom’s studio window, covering drafting table, stool, bookshelves, blue a patina before Mom registers the incoming dark and turns on the light. Then a click of the lamp and dimensionality, fullness; our cones take over again, rounding objects, coloring the room though softly, no solid lines separating things. Books, chair, stool, brushes spiking like Spanish bayonet from a coffee mug—all share shadows, blending into everything else a little, the room keeping its evening-dim, shaded and Baroque.
This is fifty years ago, Baltimore. My memory’s doubtless gotten more wrong than right, itself a study in chiaroscuro, I know how memory works.
Here in the present, Boone, North Carolina, is a box. It sat in our garage for a decade until I stagger-carried it into the house, heavier than I remembered it, a very material thing, hard lined, no chiaroscuro here. I dropped it into our dining room, where I’ve walked around it for the last several weeks. Now it squats like a thymele in the house’s center, cardboard sagging from moisture and bulgy like a dad who’s let his gut go. I open it.
Memories coalesce as I pick through its top layer: watercolor pad—Strathmore—another for oils—Fredríx medium texture—three yellowed plastic trays gone brittle. Tracing paper. Hardened oil tubes. Twine.
But I’m looking for a specific something, a petite madeleine, Proust times fifty. Find it stashed beneath the Strathmore and Fredríx:
A bottle of Grumbacher Medium III.
Mom grew up in a Norman Rockwell kind of household, spending her youth kicking around the storybook streets of Urbana, Ohio in the forties and fifties, acquiring siblings, doing all the things American kids did in the middle of the twentieth century. Loved her parents dotingly, loved her siblings, did well in school. Fell into art with precocity, who knows what prompted her.
She drew, painted, sculpted. Really though, she approached everything as art—cooking, making presents, creating Halloween costumes—and filled our tiny houses and apartments (we moved often) with prints: Mucha, Rackham, the Pre-Raphaelites. Obsessed with Maxfield Parrish, she took us on a field trip to Brandywine River Museum, with its many Parrish rooms. We saw Daybreak in person, The Lantern Bearers, Ecstasy. Learned he’d used blue undercoating, a technique giving vibrancy and dimensionality to his works (though he painted over it—how did it affect what you saw if you couldn’t see it?).
Mom might have been an artist’s model herself: striking blue eyes, generous brows conveying a gothic appearance (think Poe or Addam’s Family). Always sunny, easy to laughter, sometimes fanatic about seeing the good in the world. Around her edges hung a darker sense like smoke or whatever revenant presence haunted her. It is a fact that she was haunted. I don’t know by what. Maybe existential dread; maybe buried hurts; maybe societal restrictions; maybe nothing. Maybe she was just a troubled soul with pretty eyes and gifted hands.
We loved watching Mom draw with those hands. Like a parlor trick: years working for an ad agency in Akron–spending hours drawing models for fashion advertisements in newspapers—gave her the ability to draw people in practically any pose in minutes.
I remember thinking about this when years later she couldn’t sign checks for late bills because her DTs were so bad. Yes: I thought about those hands while watching her shake out a jagged signature like erratic lines on a lie detector test. I’m thinking about that now and wish I hadn’t remembered it. There, in a cheap motel room weeks after nearly burning her apartment down, in bed with four salvaged boxes of rumpled clothing, some utensils, everything she owned now, shaking so badly she couldn’t make a signature on a check. Those gifted hands, once capable of rendering whole worlds in pencil or oil, now unable to write her name.
Mom had come of age during a time—the 1950s—when being a woman must have caused a kind of low-grade psychosis: post-Rosie the Riveter, the era of Christian Dior and Father Knows Best and a jillion other markers of society’s fanatically oppressive gender-project. And Mom, a gorgeous walking dichotomy, celebrated and rebelled. Celebrated her family. Rebelled by running away at nineteen and getting pregnant (with me) before marriage. Celebrated with art; rebelled with art. Celebrated then rebelled with wine.
Later came harder things that killed her at sixty-seven, too young, a nonsensical death, premature, like ending lovely writing in the middle of a sentence.
So the reason I pulled the box from the garage, the reason I sought the Grumbacher’s: a single whiff and I was there, back with Mom in her studio. I miss her, am mighty blue for her, sure, that blue settling around every memory of the studio. And—as a medium is supposed to do, as writing does—it carries me: open the cap (Proust’s madeleine), sniff, and Now and Then blend. The cost, reader: I am so, so sad.
I read the first sentence, “Start with blue,” cringe at my unsubtle attempt to connect Mom’s studio to Parrish. Doesn’t work, does it? Parrish used blue as underpainting; my blue covers everything (though I couldn’t see it at the time). So: start again? Come at the project from another angle. Work over and over, change words, add color, texture, certain I’m not going to get it right, struggling toward—drawn into—Mom’s story, Mom’s interior, feeling that cadmium asymptotic doom creeping through the window. I will not get there. I will not get there.
Anyway, who needs another piece about an alcoholic mom, tortured artist, free spirit destroyed by society? My descriptions are reductive: Mom was more than my portrait here, so so much more.
“Start with blue, a cadmium wash spilling” and there I am again. The pigments, a box “like a thymele” in my room and me digging for Medium III. Painting over.
Derek Davidson teaches playwriting at Appalachian State University. His solo pieces, Ox, and Furrow, were part of Piccolo Spoleto and Asheville Fringe Festivals, and Furrow had its NYC premiere as part of the NYC New Works Festival. His internationally performed play “Blackjack” is published in Lighting the Way: An Anthology of Short Plays about the Climate Crisis. Davidson has published articles and poems in Grey Sparrow, Indelible, Jalmurra, Iron Mountain Review, Southern Theatre Magazine.
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