A number of years ago I was fortunate to be invited to one of the salons at the home of Louise Bourgeois. It was held in her Chelsea row house in a narrow room off the kitchen. Seated at a small table, facing everyone in the room, she engaged in a dialogue with each artist one at a time. I had heard stories about how Louise Bourgeois was brutally honest in her critiques and feedback, but for the most part what I saw was her keen mind and artist’s eye – and her curiosity.
I had asked her guidelines for what to bring, and she said, with matter-of-fact simplicity, “The bigger the better.” I had obliged, and when it was my turn the large painting I had brought had to be moved in from the hallway and balanced precariously on a stool in front of her so she could see it properly. She began by asking questions that focused on the specific, and then built towards the general (and in this case “general” meant the meaning of the painting). Her eyes were like those of a hawk, piercingly observant, missing nothing as she asked about minute details and connected them to the broader whole, prompting me to articulate how I had found what the painting was actually about in the process of creating it. L.B. grew more animated as this process went on, culminating with her exclamation, “…we know through doing!”
Looking back, when my father passed away on Valentine’s day a few years later, L.B.’s succinct statement regarding artistic process (knowing through doing) was more applicable for me than ever; I wanted to make a painting about my father’s death but didn’t have a clear idea at all what such a painting would look like. In fact, I had no idea how to even start such a painting – dealing with the many layers of grievance, the memories of my father and my own life, the mysteries and ineffability of death, was an overwhelming prospect. But the impulse – the need – to make that painting remained.
After some time, I thought of Egon Schiele’s deathbed drawing of Gustav Klimt, his teacher and fellow artist. My father had been an artist, and I realized I could address his death indirectly via Schiele’s image of the deceased Klimt. Next, I posed Emmie, our South African mastiff, backlit at the top of our basement stairs, Janus-like, bright daylight behind her and the dark basement stairs in front. She was as liminal – as “between” – in reality-based space as one can get; this opened up the metaphor I needed to paint about my father’s own liminal state as he shifted from living to dying. The addition of a cast of one of the dead of Pompeii at the top of the door helped insert a timeless sense of pathos I felt when I saw some of them in Italy; the experience was as unknowable as being in the presence of my dead father. Last, I included several graffiti images from Krog Street bridge; adolescent and raw, they added some of the universal immediacy of the human urge to make marks on a surface, something that has been at the heart of art-making since Lascaux and Chauvet.
Paradoxically, in order to achieve the goal of this entire process – which I learned through the actual making of the painting (Bourgeois’ reference to knowing through doing) – I had to undertake a painting that was not literally about my father’s death. As I began the process of making preliminary drawings and color studies, it became clear that the painting needed to be about loss in general, about one of life's guarantees that we tend to not think about: that we all will lose loved ones, and there is no easy way to make sense of it. So, I decided to use an approach that was more vibrant in palette and execution than my preliminary studies; in its final form, the painting had to be as much about the vitality of life as it was about loss, and the bright colors and active brushwork provided the counterpoint I needed to accomplish this: meaning derived from the juxtaposition of opposites.
