The circus train

I tell myself the train will give me the opportunity to draw. I will draw the entire country as it speeds by. The demand to draw quickly and without thinking is not new to me. At Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I am taught to draw croquis, those quick sketches, some as quick as 20 seconds, demanded of the student in a life drawing class. In the late Murray Dessner’s class, these instant sketches mean drawing everything in the room; the floor, the ceiling, the chair, the model, everything, and covering every inch of the newsprint in a frenetic mess.

Drawing is the medium by which I get used to things: get familiar with surroundings, experience changes, get used to my mother dying.

Goodbye/hello

I don’t know why my mother is dying. She has lots of health problems. Two weeks earlier she called to ask if I could fly out in order to drive her to Oregon. She wants to commit suicide.

As usual, the options my mother gives me are simple and extreme — assist in the pushing or accept the falling. Years have taught me to accept the falling.

This falling is what the printmaking of etching demands of me: that I accept whatever happens, knowing that ultimately most of the process is out of my control. I create an etching plate based upon a drawing, develop a specific color harmony, a composition, and then drag all of that to the edge of a cliff. At the cliff it will fall as it will fall.

That cliff is the etching press and the point clearly telling me I have no control in the process, if I ever thought I did.

I ask my prison art class, “When you were little boys did you dream of growing up to become inmates in a maximum security prison?” They all answer with variations of, “Nah, I never thought I’d be here!” I say, “Great! Then you will all make excellent printmakers!”

Painting works similarly. But because the hands never leave the painting process (unless the artist has developed a Jackson Pollock throw), the artist can paint as if he or she is in control. The Jackson throw introduces confusion because it suggests that an artist has control and needs to gets away from the paint to get rid of control.

Great painters know the flow of paint is its own master and does not care what the artist intends. Any artist who thinks that one can control the flow of paint just creates bad paintings.

As I tell my class, “If you ever been in a flood, you know that water does what water wants, and the water in a watercolor is no different.” Some of the students have been in floods and all have known falling.

In transit

Art school teaches me to unthink whatever I thought I saw because I saw nothing and then embellished it with a mental something. The 20-second croquis is my new trainer, forcing me to see the world without surplus, taking only what I need.

The train is delayed somewhere in Colorado, and the quick drawings become the three-hour drawing session that I expect of a PAFA portrait class. When I see that the train is stopped next to the circus train, I think of Peaches, the legendary PAFA model. After years in vaudeville she continued to take off her clothes for art students well into old age.

While drawing the unpeopled circus train, I imagine my mother in the circus; maybe as the tiger trainer or the snake swallower. My mother had once killed a rattlesnake with a shovel when it almost bit my youngest brother. Death is not sufficient punishment. My mother skins and forces that snake to become a hatband for my father, making my paternal grandmother cry, “Madge, that will only bring bad luck to Gene!”

Years later, when my father is killed in an accident and the state trooper gives me a brown paper bag containing his belongings, I find the hat. My brain wanders to a question only my grandmother would ever ask, “Was it the hatband?”

No, my mother’s circus role would certainly not be as an animal handler. Her place in the circus would be more aggressive: the flamethrower, the knife hurler, the person who shoots from the hip.

My mother bought a caboose. She lives in it by herself on an abandoned track running into the woods to nowhere. Despite this, my mother ends up on the local TV news program as The Woman Who Lives in A Caboose: a cute sideshow of a strange woman living in a caboose to get away from it all, aired for an audience that seeks entertainment and does not want to know of the seven children she left behind — some old enough, some not, and some in-between.

Hello/goodbye

When I arrive at the California facility where my mother is dying, I greet her with, “Hi, Mom, it’s me, Treacy.” Her answer of “Hi and hopefully, goodbye,” carries a finality dismissing any superficial chitchat. Probably inappropriately, I notice and then point out, “Mom, your Philly accent returned.”

After spending a lifetime fighting the accent and the Philadelphia it represents, my mother is taking it with her.

My mother is committed to this death. When she leaves the now six remaining, it is an act of acceptance displaying a profound will to let it be and be gone, not a flight into anger.

As an artist working in my studio every day, I know that creativity is not passive. It is, however, a process of relinquishment: a relinquishment demanding the artist to let things become and then a relinquishment to let that same becoming go, underscoring that art is always and ultimately important, and never precious.