Excerpts from Bathwater Paintings, 2021-2022
I have kept these paintings inside a box inside my closet for years. I have packed them carefully, wrapped them up carefully, and moved them from one home to another. One closet and then another. In returning to this work tonight, now, all this time later I don’t know how to tell you what I meant by it. A word comes to mind and it feels true: longing. This is, I think, a place to begin.
In the spring of 2021 the world bloomed wildly around me and I gave birth. The same night I surrendered myself to life, for a time, I touched death. For a time I nearly lost us both.
And then, suddenly, we were home. All that night. What I remember is the weight of him, the heat of him, his brand new skin florescent even in the dark. That humid attic room, the soft glow of lamplight, my sweating, swollen, dripping body and all of me listening for the rhythm of his breath. What I remember is how the sky crashed and stormed and raged until dawn, thunder so close it trembled the windows, unsettled the air. How small, how fragile we all seemed that night inside that shaking house.
In the months that followed, I found myself stunned by my own life and holding tight to everything I could hold, clinging especially to my infant son. For instance: his bathwater. That he could shed even a single cell of his skin, that I could then wash away this precious part of him down the drain felt impossible. And then there was the water left each morning in the basin of our dehumidifier — this water pulled from the air while we slept in that damp and creaking cottage. This water and inside it, surely I would find our breathing, our breath, his holy breath and how could I bring myself to empty it, to just pour it all out?
I couldn’t — not always, not often — and so for months I preserved what I could with paint. I painted the same shape: a circle. And every time I used the same color blue. I don’t know why. It was the only thing I could think to do and it became a ritual, an obsession, a protective spell — a way to fill the nights, that dreaded time of day when the hospital loomed close and beckoned me back. Each day it would arrive with the dark and begin its gesturing, its signaling, its threatening to carry me off. It was as if part of me had gone drifting that night, had been left behind endlessly giving birth, and this — the painting — this was me calling her back.
The paintings, they had their own gravity and I welcomed their weight. For hours I would let them make me heavy and still as I painted circle after slow circle with his bathwater, our air water. I would eventually find other waters, too, began to recognize water as a beholder, a witness, a keeper of secret evidences, a guardian of treasured things.
There is my life here, in these paintings. Still you can find the bits of hair and dust that settled in as the pigment dried. The desks in my studio, imagine even the window sills, the chairs and the floors, every surface lined end-to-end for months with these circle paintings.
And then something happened so quietly, so suddenly I nearly missed it: one evening I drained the tub and didn’t think to save a thing. Just as suddenly, I stopped making the paintings. The paintings themselves are small, easily held, can be lifted up and looked at and carried around if this was something someone felt moved to do. The paper is sturdy, a little bent, resilient and it has teeth. The pigment is delicate and — in the places where the paint was left thickest — has started to crumble, is eroding into deep blue dust.
. . .
2.5” x 3.5”
Watercolor; various water sources: bathwater, rainwater, melted snow, tap water; occasionally there is breast milk; and sometimes, in some places: gouache.