Another "not a pet portrait'

Mom and I

oils on paper

7" x 10"

My mom keeps asking me to send her pictures of my recent work and I keep deferring; one, because, as she does not use the internet, I would have to make a lot of prints (my latest pieces only make sense when seen serially), and two, because showing her my recent work would engender questions that I don’t want to have to answer.  Questions that would yield words such as “appropriation”, “ready-mades” and “Duchamp”; words that render me extremely tired when I imagine them in the context of trying to explain them to her.  Mind you, my mother loves art, and she is not close-minded about it either; for instance, she loves Georg Baselitz, but Duchamp might be a stretch.   

We often go to museums together and I “lecture” on the stuff we see, and she loves that.  I really would not mind showing her my work in person and explaining it as we inspected it physically; but as she lives in a different continent and no longer travels, that’s not going to happen, and the thought of doing it by phone just... well... tires me.

My mother does paint.  She started late in life; and for an untrained person, her eye-hand coordination is impressive.   Ironically, her subject matter consists of images she finds in art magazines or postcards which she then copies free hand into much larger formats and paints in gouache using tiny brushes to change the colors in ways that please her.   The irony comes in the fact that although I don’t want to explain the concept of postmodern appropriation to her, for all intents and purposes what she does is a form of, if not conceptually based appropriation, certainly a kind of formal and emotional appropriation.  She calls it original work (and who’s to say it isn’t...).

My mom is getting on in years, and because I am being a little shit by not sending her pictures of my work, and because I know it will give her immense pleasure (though ex-post, I was actually wrong about this), I decided I wanted to give her a painted piece.  In my view, it is so much more fun to receive one of those rather than a bunch of little incomprehensible facsimiles, though she will keep asking for them, and maybe one day I’ll relent.  I am sending her a small portrait (pictured above in digital facsimile) of the both of us.  I chose to paint it on paper and to make it no larger than eight by ten inches in order to easily send it through “the mails”.

 

The image I cropped from an old low resolution and, unfortunately, fading analog picture my husband took of us when we were all a lot younger on our first outing together a year after my dad’s passing.  The passing of my father was a huge turning point in the family dynamic, for as an only child I always thought of the family as a unit of three, and now there were only two.   

I hope she likes the picture; I had fun painting it.  I chose the image for the subject matter but as I painted it, it became a meditation on reds and blues even though the coat my mom is wearing and the enormous bag she is sporting are purely black. “Olfactory masturbation” as Duchamp called it, or not, painting for me always boils down to color.