Monday January 17th.
I have been considering tossing out all my old sketchbooks and diaries from twenty or thirty years ago but thought I should look at them first. I found a series of self-portraits drawn in crayon, from the dark blue and black Critic drawn with fierce lines to the Girl with the Red Face. The drawing fills the entire page of my sketch book. She looks everything from very young to rather fierce, as though she might weep or give birth or both at the same time.
Here is the description of the Red Face that I wrote at the time:
“A young girl was standing on the top of Beacon Hill in Boston, a posh neighborhood of elegant city homes. ‘I want to write a book’ she cried out, meaning that she wanted to experience life in all its hues and complexities. It was as though I needed the cover of writing to look closely at all of life with as much curiosity as was allowed.
My daughters still get embarrassed when they eat with me in restaurants. ‘Mum you are staring’ they say quietly as I look intently at the diners. I am always invisible when I watch others, I slide into the atmosphere and dissolve like gelatin in warm water, smooth and colorless. But here is the difficulty. The stories take me to painting, to my hands, to my body that has an urgent need to express itself. My body is a rock, but add water or glue, or color and light, and it can become anything and then all I want to do is draw, draw faces, my faces.
Ah, here is the Girl with the Red Face bringing a hollow feeling with her, there is no room here for her. She arrives silently, slipping through the walls, her Red Face glowing in the dull light of the morning. You can’t hide a Red Face no matter what you do. It lights the way for you whether you want it or not. This Red Face announces to the world the ‘I am’ that I have kept wrapped, hidden, masked for an eternity and now demands space and light. The ‘I am’ that exists in spite of all I do to keep her covered and hidden, even from myself, the ‘I am’ that is.”
I never allowed myself to see the artist that arrived in childhood, until my fifties when I started to draw and make pots, and then I thought once started I would never stop. I spent hours and days in my studio as only the possessed can. Now I stare at these sketch books, the piles of drawings smudged and worn, and I wonder how I allowed her to go back into hiding. It is time to find out.
