My Mother's Paintings
My Mother's Paintings
My mother was a painter. Margaret Morisette. Impressionistic landscapes, oil on canvas, the kind of work that had an elegance to the brushwork that I didn't fully understand when I was a child sitting beside her watching.
Looking back now, with painter's eyes, I can see she was classically trained. The way she handled light. The economy of her marks. Nobody self-teaches that kind of control. There was a foundation under everything she made that only comes from serious study.
She never talked about it.
She died in 2002. She had given most of her paintings away by then, which is a thing painters do when they don't think of themselves as artists. There was a mural on the side of my uncle's house that lasted until recently. I wouldn't know where to find her work now. It's out there in the world, unattributed, living in people's homes who may not know what they have.
She was reserved. Almost cold at home, some people might have said. In public she was a warm inviting person, ready to give people the shirt off of her back. That was something that could be seen as a fault because she would go without if it came to that. She had an inviting presence when she was in public. I never really understood why she was like this, I only knew her as a person outside of mom for a few years. As I grew older little things started clicking into place. Her fear of crowded spaces, her need for order and quiet. Some of that was the effect of the Sixties Scoop. Although she was born in the 50’s, my mother was part of that, taken from her family, forced into a world that didn't belong to her. What looked like coldness was the particular kind of guardedness that comes from having been taken. I once asked my grandmother why she gave my mother up for adoption, all she said was that in those days we didn’t have a choice. You could still see the pain in her eyes 45 years later. Then she shook her head and replaced the sadness with that sunny smile she always wore.
She never taught me to paint in the conventional sense. There were no lessons, no instruction, no verbal correction. If she saw frustration in me she would show me how, not tell me how. I learned by watching and mimicking. This is still, to this day, the way I learn the most. We always had books around about art, impressionists, European painters, the kind of books that came from library sales and secondhand shops.
If she didn't say anything about something you made, you knew she approved. That was the whole system.
She died before I became a serious painter. She never saw what the watching produced. I think about that sometimes when I'm working on something that's going right — the way a passage of light comes together, the moment a composition locks in. She would have seen it without me having to explain it. That's a particular kind of loss.
I am making the work she didn't get to see me make. That's the closest thing I have to a conversation with her now.
Jackie
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