I am Swamped

I have one hundred eleven stories about me as a portrait painter sitting in my laptop waiting to be reviewed and revised. I never dreamed I would live the second half of my life flush with new creative ideas that would demand their time. I thought growing old was about harvesting from spent barren fields and not tilling new fertile ground.

Looking for van Gogh's Bedroom

Bedrooms are a place for privacy. It's where we do and act out our most personal and intimate moments as well as a place for comfort and rest. I never had a desire to paint my bedrooms (my sanctuaries) as I moved from place to place. A friend once photographed me in my current bedroom peeking out from behind my open bookcase. To reveal what my bedroom looks like, even after the bed has been made and the room dusted; for me, it would be full frontal nudity.

But I became obsessed with van Gogh's bedroom years ago when it was on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. The moment I stood in front of his painting—something happened. I had to have a copy for myself. I went looking for either a poster, which they did not have, or a postcard. I bought two postcards, one for my studio and one for my home. Those postcards shared my life for years following me from studio to studio and the other from apartments-to- home. They were always up on a wall where I could see them. What did his bedroom have that mine never did?

I can't remember all my bedrooms; though, I remember my first one, the house I lived in until I was 12-years-old. I remember sky-blue walls, and imagined the room was huge. Years later I saw that room again with its single twin bed, one thin pillow, and a narrow chest of drawers. There wasn't even room for a mirror.

My second bedroom was smaller yet. It didn't have a chest of drawers, only the single twin and one pillow. My parents carved a large kitchen into three rooms which became a kitchen and two bedrooms; a bedroom for me and another for my brother. My bedroom had two outside walls and was always cold during the winter and my mother froze our leftover meals under my bed.

In college dorm rooms I slept in a bunk bed and, luckily, I usually got the bottom. When I moved into a furnished bedroom off campus, that was only a place to rest my head—after parties and maybe studying. No. I never studied in my college dorm or apartment, not when libraries were the social place to study.

From college I moved to Chicago and lived for a year or two in a girls' club called, "The Eleanor Club." (I am still friends with a number of those "girls" today.) That room with its single twin bed at least had a sink and mirror. But again, it was only a place to rest my head—after parties.

As I moved again and again, my bedrooms got larger, but still a single twin and that one thin pillow. I guess I loved to cuddle. Again, no mirror, (van Gogh had a mirror in his bedroom and I often wondered if that was a European thing). Instead I filled my bedrooms with books—mystery books, lots of them. I mean lots. 

I never gave a thought to my bedrooms and what they looked like. They were a place to read for a few minutes until I was sleepy. I would close my eyes and wake up the next day. Who cared what came after washing my face, brushing my teeth, and falling asleep. That is, I didn't care until I stood in front of van Gogh's painting and had to own that copy.

I once came across W.H. Auden's poem titled "Musee des Beaux Arts," describing Peter Brueghel's painting, "The Fall of Icarus." I understood Auden's obsession. Like Auden's moment before Brueghel's painting, I stood before my van Gogh's postcard and slowly came to know the artist, Vincent.

Artists say the thrill of observation has no equal. There are many reasons to see an original painting. In art history classes I looked at projected slide images 40 feet wide on auditorium screens, or the same image four inches wide in art books, and today three inches wide on a computer screen (or full screen, depending on the size of my computer). Distorted images create distorted perceptions. Colors or the energy of a brush are not authentic to the original painting because no book or internet image captures Vincent's ability to take the ordinary and create something extraordinary.

I wanted to understand the artist who painted a bedroom filled with sunlight, who scrupulously realized his sensations. Painters, previous to van Gogh (and then later photographers), were concerned with giving a permanent form to the ephemeral; that is, artists made our ever changing landscapes—static. A bedroom does not move in the conventional sense but changes constantly in other ways—notably through light.

Vincent understood the specific quality of his light that fell on a specific place at a specific moment. His bedroom was not a fixed and solid sculpture but an insubstantial image, as transient as his light that continually redefined it. For van Gogh, this brilliant technique to capture light, scrape it off the objects onto his palette, nothing less would be adequate to describe his subject.

As I slowly understood van Gogh's bedroom painting, I began to understand who I was. It is the artist and not what the bedroom holds. If that had been my bedroom my eyes would have seen only shabbiness. I, the poorer artist, unable to take three primary colors red, blue, and yellow and paint a room filled with sunlight, a metaphor for Vincent's light heart in 1889, the year before he committed suicide.

Pardon me while I go and set up my easel in my bedroom.

"First place winner in creative non-fiction of the College of DuPage 2016 Writers Read: Emerging Voices contest, held to showcase emerging voices in our community."

Published in "Prairie Light Review" Vol. XXXVIII No. 2, p. 56.

Ida Kotyuk©
If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.

The Embrace

I never dreamed I would wear it to bed every night. At first, it was simpler to reach for it, hanging on my “nightgown” nail in the closet. How did it get there? Did it follow me home?

The shirt was never a favorite—never an obsession. But, every night I depended on it to help me sleep. Also, I could throw it into my laundry bag along with my other cotton clothes. A plaid flannel shirt doesn't need to be coddled. It only needs to be worn.

I have no memory how it got into my home. The shirt began life and lived in another state. I would have had to drive across state borders, carry it out of that house, and walk up one flight of stairs into my apartment. My first memory was to see it hang on that nail in my closet and the many nights I grabbed for it. No matter. Startled, I would feel its softness as I slid my arms into its sleeves. I would feel its embrace.

I wore it night after night, month after month, laundry after laundry. The shirt lost its original colors and faded into neutral. It began to look like a dust rag.

"I can't give it up," I said one day at lunch. "It's beginning to shred and, once it's gone, I know I won't sleep again."

My quilter friend asked, "Does it have a pocket?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you cut off the pocket and sew it onto something else and wear that to bed?"

Only a quilter would see and understand the importance of a pocket and find a place for it. I would never look at quilts the same again. But I also knew it was time to say goodbye. I carefully folded the shredded no-longer plaid flannel shirt and placed it in a drawer.

That night, I prepared for bed. I found one of my frilly silly nightgowns, put it on, walked to the photograph of my mother and father, and said, "Goodbye Daddy."

I slept that night.

Published in "Prairie Light Review" Vol. XXXVIII No. 2, p.45 (including artwork).
Kotyuk©

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.

Apologies

I have friends who are Kawasaki writers. They sit down, fingers at the keyboard, and within one hour type 100 pages; pages that actually make sense and they only edit once—maybe.

If lucky, I type one new sentence an hour while editing. I don't daydream and I'm not stuck. But new words keep popping up and I want the perfect word. I work with the same slow deliberation in my drawings and paintings and, sometimes, I have to step away.

There are no exciting verbs to describe a slow-working deliberate artist.

I stepped away longer than I intended because I had to rethink my blog. I didn't want to write about feeling good during my education because a learning curve is painful—no pain, no learning curve. Remember your frustration during high school and college math classes You had to take to graduate? Carry those feelings forward into starting and maintaining a profession—plus the artistic frustrations.

Sometimes "flounder" is a fish and sometimes it's a verb. That must be where the notion of the tortured artist lies. One of my professors had said, all artists have a flat forehead from hitting it with their hand as they finally "get it."

I knew what I did not want to blog about: not how-to(s) about technique, brushes, canvases, etc., and certainly not when excellent how-to(s) by other artists keep coming onto the internet.

Previously, while I worked on commissions my life had revolved around my clients' needs and the preconceptions they brought to our meetings because portraiture is highly personal and intimate. Everyone remembers a different parent's face or sibling's face from decade-to-decade. I.e., my older brother remembered a youthful active mother while I remembered a mother who was slowly dying.

I made quite a list of what I did not want to write. Though I had written about family resemblance and the importance of unique names, I had spent my 50 years painting, not writing.

In her essay "On Keeping a Notebook" Joan Didion wrote "I wanted to remember what it was to be me." My paintings, drawings, and portraits are my journal and I want to remember what it was to be Ida. I want to remember my clients, and my clients' stories. Portraiture is about the human body (that's my part) but my clients' motivations to seek out a portrait painter is because love, as an emotion, comes in a variety of shapes, just as many shapes as there are people and moments of loving.

Instead I developed a different list of questions—see, learning never stops. Why should anyone care about the education of a basically unknown artist? How do I write interestingly?

I decided to write about what I learned from my 1,001 mistakes in marketing, lecture tours, public relations, sales, influences from others and elsewhere, my own memories, and finally what I learned from my clients. I fell in love with the families I met and also discovered I really enjoy the business part of art.

These are my reasons for the two-year gap—learning how to "say it" by a lot of thinking and working with other writers.

I'm back.

Ida Kotyuk©

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.