Tag: The Art of Looking Back: A painter

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter (Julia Kristeva)

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Today I am going to cut out 70 small squares of unbleached cotton. I’ll starch the cotton before cutting (I found a tin of spray starch on the shelves above the washing machine, never used…). And then I will paint some lines on each little square. They will be fastened — glue and a single stitch — on the keepsakes John printed to celebrate the upcoming publication of my memoir, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze; these will be handed out at readings to those who purchase the book and I will also mail them to people who let me know they’ve bought my book.

Letterpress printing is an interesting process. The type is set, one letter at a time, in a small device called a composing stick. One letter after another until a word is made, a sentence, a paragraph, eventually a book (if that’s your intention). You set the type upside down, nick to the top. The blocks of type are placed carefully in an iron frame called a chase on a perfectly level surface — ours is a piece of marble we bought from a monumental works in Victoria — and the extra space is filled with with wooden furniture. Everything is locked into place using wedge-shaped quoins — you can see 2 of those in the upper part of the photograph, along with the key used to tighten them.

The printing is done on a 19th century Chandler & Price platen press we bought 46 or 47 years ago. Our press is treadle-driven, meaning that the printer peddles with the right foot, adjusting speed and pressure to suit the process. Ink is placed on an inking disk, rollers run over the disk, then they ink the type in the chase, and when the printer feels everything is ready to go, he or she pulls a lever that allows paper to meet the type. The type is impressed into the surface of the paper by the pressure of the meeting.

There are always little glitches. This time, an unexpected one: the typeface chosen to print the little keepsake only had a single 2 in the size the text was set in. And the date of the publication? 2026. So a line had to be removed, reset in a larger size. Luckily it was the name of the publisher — Thornapple Press — so it made sense to bump up the font size, give the name extra weight. Always glitches, because the equipment is old, the process is old, and things go wrong. (We’d hoped for 100 copies and, well, we ended up with 77.) But I couldn’t be happier with the results.

These will make excellent bookmarks! And imagine them with a tiny canvas in that space you can see. That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend.

This is a book that was difficult to write. In a way, I wish I had just ignored the pile of letters I found in a filing cabinet and the various other materials I’d stored with them. Re-reading this stuff made me realize that the story I’d told myself and others about a relationship with a painter when I was 23 and he was in his 50s wasn’t the whole story. It was meeting the eyes of the young woman whose portrait hangs in the stairwell of my home that gave me the courage to settle in for the work of learning the art of looking back. And it was an unsettling year and a half, the time it took to write a draft. I found someone to talk about it with, a wise and patient woman who listened and asked questions, as I asked questions of her, of my younger self, and of the other paintings of me in our house. I’m grateful now to have done this work because I learned things and I’ve given up some of the shame I carried, often buried so deep I forgot it was there. How it occasioned unintended behaviours, patterns. The epigraph for the book is from Julia Kristeva’s extraordinary essay, “Stabat Mater”: Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. It’s particularly aligned with one painting referenced in my book, a painting I never knew existed until I was told about it, a painting of me in which I am holding a scarf or veil over my head. Words were what I had, have, to make peace with the young woman I was.


Turn, I will ask the young poet with flowers in her hair, you who have kept a certain privacy for decades, watching me descend the stairs, you who also watched me climb them, weary or joyous or lost in thought. I carried sorrow up the stairs and down them too. I felt your gaze in the ascent and the descent. Watch me. Watch me open my hands, releasing the shame I carried, hidden mostly but always a weight, an unnecessary guilt. I took off my clothes and I am commemorated with Cadmium Yellow lightened with Flake White, Alizarin Crimson, Prussian Blue, Viridian, Chrome Green. The warm light shimmering with Titanium Buff, Yellow Ochre. My hair, Thalo Blue, Thalo Green, Alizarin Crimson, Indian Yellow, underlayered with transparent yellow. On the Irish island, I walked on the rocks in grey mist and wrapped my arms around my body to contain myself. “Let a body venture at last.” At last I am at least unwrapping the veil, shaking the words from its fine gauze. What happens next, happens.

the peacock skirt

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In 1975, I bought a skirt at Carnaby Street on lower Yates Street in Victoria. I was a university student, I had a tiny income working part time (on weekends), and I couldn’t afford $50, which was the price of the skirt. I loved it though, the fullness of it, the peacocks appliqued along the bottom, between bands of pink, red, and deep burgundy. And, I reasoned, I could simply just eat macaroni for a couple of weeks, because I couldn’t afford the skirt and food. I was not a thin young woman. The two close friends I had then kept reminding me. But when I wore the skirt, I felt beautiful.

I wore the skirt a lot. I felt like my best self with its wide generous hem swirling around my ankles. I wore it the first time I met the painter who is the subject of my memoir, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. It was the opening reception for a show of the Limners, a group of Victoria artists — painters, sculptors, print-makers, potters — and I remember I asked a friend to go with me. We drove out to Utley’s Gallery near Saanichton, three years after I’d bought the skirt.

I wore my black skirt with peacocks appliquéd around the hem, a black leotard, and my brother’s faded Levi’s jacket. I was finishing my degree at the University of Victoria and I was planning to travel to Ireland once classes finished.
When we entered the gallery, a ramshackle building with rooms on two levels, the first person I encountered was Sylvia Skelton. She took my hand and said, “You must come and see your portrait!” My portrait? No Limner had painted me, not that I knew of, but Sylvia had my hand and was leading me down some stairs to a room hung with many paintings and drawings by Myfanwy Pavelic of an elegant young woman, long-limbed, both naked and clothed; I knew that wasn’t me. For a time I’d lived on Ardmore Drive, sharing a friend’s family summer home, and at night we’d walk by Myfanwy’s studio, lit up, and we knew she was working. Tall trees surrounded her house and studio, making things even darker; the glow from her windows in the night sky was entrancing. An artist at work! Maybe she was working on these, which were beautiful. (Her iconic portrait of Pierre Trudeau was still in the future.) “There,” said Sylvia, “there you are.” And on the wall was a small painting of a girl in a hat. In my memory the hat was green. Or maybe it was red. It wasn’t me and yet it was, in a way; it was my head, my hair, my face. Someone gave me a glass of wine and I stood close to the painting, looking at it in wonder. “Meet the painter,” Sylvia was saying, and I turned to see Jack.

Let me go back a paragraph. When I say the painter is the subject of my memoir, does that make me the object? For a time I certainly was just that: the object of his affections, of his work, of his deepening and honestly quite disturbing obsession. So he was the subject in the sense that he was performing the action(s) of a verb, I suppose you’d say. And me, I was the person, place, or thing impacted by his actions. I was young, 23 when I met him, and although I’d had some experience of the world, travelling on my own to Europe, having an relationship with an Greek man named Agamemnon, working in London to keep myself in that city for a few months, I was not what you’d call worldly. And the memoir explores what it is to be objectified, to be painted, to be fixed in time by a fierce possessive gaze. And it also explores what it is to begin to understand agency, consent.

The skirt has been folded up in a bag in the pine trunk where I keep my sweaters and special blankets and linens. I haven’t been able to fasten the waist closure for years, not since the birth of my 3rd child. My body changed. And it never occurred to me that I could adjust the skirt to make it fit. But now that my book is coming out and I am reminded (on the first page!) of that evening when I dressed up in that treasured skirt, peacocks appliqued all around the bottom, I’ve decided to have it altered. I have an appointment on Friday afternoon with a woman who can do the kind of dressmaking and alteration that I can’t do myself. Yes, I can sew, I can quilt, and I can make small repairs, but I am too careless to trust myself to shape my beloved skirt to my body, 51 years older than when I saw it on a rack in Carnaby Street on Lower Yates Street. And here’s a surprise: I thought of myself as so large and ungainly in those years but the waistband is actually quite narrow.

Some events are beginning to be organized to celebrate the publication of The Art of Looking Back. If you come to one of them, don’t be surprised if I’m wearing my peacock skirt, adjusted for what life’s experience does to a woman’s body.