My latest contribution to the family lineage, as my sister lustily mines genealogy finds online (such as The Saint Paul, a ship that brought our Swiss forbears to these shores), is to scan old photos of my mother and send them up to Flickr.
The process asks more of me than techno-cunning (the scanner’s on its last gasp) - I feel a worried fondness for the girl who grew to be my mom. So much life, these pictures only hint at!
Jane Hewes was beautiful and talented, not to mention sharp. She explored modern dance, painting, writing, life in New York City - then, thunk, she got married and had four kids. Us.
So the New Yorker piece about a show in DC that features Dutch painter Judith Leyster, whose path to artist-motherhood mirrored my mother’s and - is this so? - my own, gets my attention. In the entire 17th century, only two women were granted membership in the painter’s guild of Haarlem. Judith Leyster was one of them. And yet,
...at the age of twenty six, Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, a successful but starkly inferior artist, and plunged into childbearing and family affairs. The little that remains of what she created thereafter lacks her previous, blazing originality. I knew Leyster was good, but the Washington show surprised me with its suggestions of the formation of a great artist. It left me indignant on her behalf...
Dutch genius of the seventeenth century found successive, disparate balance points in an engulfing tumult of worldly change. Leyster verged on one of her own. But the life it would have required, that of an independent woman, was unsustainable. In our last glimpse of her, she plays a dainty cittern in her husband’s ‘The Duet.’ He, with a huge lute, is proudly ebullient. Her face is a mask of banal contentment. The boldly creative young artist, ripe with promise, has disappeared.
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
As I live and breathe the life she chose to give me, I’m both indignant on my mother’s behalf and guilty of having squandered her blazing originality on my scuffed knees and cowgirl independence. If guilt is not the happy place to be, is denial so much safer? It’s time to ask the honest question. Is there artist life beyond motherhood, or is the hep cat long out of the bag by then?
Somewhere in my musings, along about now, I ask words and thoughts to jostle out a merest poof of meaning, incremental wisdom for the foot to lift and forward ho. But the battle of artist loyalty and mother love is too fierce for simple wisdom. See the casualties sprawled everywhere, bones and birds of blazing art, abandoned.
Words seem to be taking me noplace new just now, so the old standbys will have to do:
Forgive me, Mom. And thank you.
Public domain painting Judith Leyster, self portrait
