Wherein Leah decides that she needs to write about life and art and God and put it somewhere other people can read it instead of the several dozen notebooks stashed around her house.

 

 

For most of you reading this, you probably already know me, but for those who don’t, or those social media friends who are only familiar with my art, here is a brief introduction.

 

My name is Leah Mitchell and I’m an artist. My days are spent bouncing between painting and caregiving, both demand 100 percent of me. I realized a while back when my kids were young and I was struggling to find studio time and focus, that there are two competing myths. Ones is of Saintly Motherhood, and the other the Myth of Artistic Genius. Both narratives have one thing in common, the sublimation of personhood and the sacrifice of everything else. To be an artist, it must be all consuming, and so must motherhood.

I have a shirt I wear that says “Art before Dishes” to wear when chores seem to be keeping me out of the studio and in the kitchen . But the truth of the axiom of my life is “People before Painting” so I will introduce that side of the I am first. I am the filling in the generational sandwich that no one adequately warns us about, with children and parents both on the cusp of life and death, intangible and huge, and me in the middle holding a butterfly net and wearing the wrong shoes.

 

Married right out of college and a mother soon after, parts of my soul existing outside of my body, walking and talking and making decisions, driving (gulp) getting jobs and applying to colleges. Three of my flesh and one of my heart. The brightest of lights, creative and loving souls. The oldest is in college and I homeschool the youngest. The middle two are about to graduate high school.

On the other side of the sandwich are my parents: My father has Alzheimer’s disease way too young, and my mother is profoundly sad. Each week I spend two afternoons with my dad to give my mom a break as his primary caretaker. It’s never enough and I can’t fix it. Anticipatory Grief, Ambiguous Grief, grieving the loss of a person while they are still alive, My father tells me that I’m good and holds my hand, I could have used that when I was 17 but I’ll take it now. I miss him every time I have a project to do, because projects were the way we connected, my dad’s love language involved a hammer and a spade.

 

Walking with my mother as she grieves the loss of her husband, as she is thrust back into the physical demands of high impact neverending daily caregiving (the kind that you do when a child is very small with the hope and faith that fruit will come of it, is now the withering of hope and a tree that will not make it to next harvest.) is a wholly separate emotional journey and perhaps even harder. I recognize that I can’t fix my dad’s degenerative disease, but some part of me still wants to fix my mom’s sadness.

 

Yesterday my oldest, my son, was complaining about the sysophian nature of his job at the grocery store where he stocks and tidies shelves, you can work all you want but you will never finish. I gave him the classic maternal philosophical answer of “yep, that is how life is” all of the tasks of daily life can only be set down unfinished and then picked back up to be done again the next day. I think that is in part why I paint. The laundry and the dishes, the emotional and physical aspects of caregiving are never complete, they are renewed with need each day. But when I paint I can finish something, look at it and say “I did that” and it won’t be undone the next day. As I explained that to my 20 year old he answered with “yeah, you will always have a basement full of finished paintings” Ouch! But accurate, which of course begs the question in fine tree falling in forest fashion: if an artist makes a painting that no one sees, did she really make it? That is a post for another day.

Writing about art is hard.

Why do I paint?

To stay alive.

Because I love the feel of brush on canvas,

The challenge of Making.

In a way, painting is like talking to yourself,

Or maybe that’s too specific, humming rather

The questions and ideas that sit at the back of my mind

Waiting,

Reaching for Something

I paint in response to questions, but not to answer them

I paint the questions

Or more accurately what is behind and before the question

The subflooring, the underlayment

the nagging feeling in my chest

Sometimes it’s a sense of “Wrongness”

This feels off, it’s not the way it’s supposed to be

I feel it in the recesses of my soul

What is wrong? How is it meant to be?

I paint to ask the question, to maybe float a possible answer,

Or two

Or a hundred

I paint because there are Questions that words can’t answer

As soon as words arrive

to define and pin down and explain and rationalize and understand

We think we have it.

The answer to life the universe and everything, so clear and obvious

If you just ignore all the things that don’t fit

Or maybe when words try to answer they just come up with more questions

Or maybe there are too many answers and none of them make sense

I paint to ask not answer.

To hint, draw, tantalize, wonder, imagine

It definitely isn’t about the answer

prose escapes me,

Writing about art is hard.