A Three Dog Life (11 page)

It was for sale. I couldn't believe my luck. Bill Richards, the painter who ran the art studio at the center, introduced me to the artist, Ed Kindberg, a shy man in a wheelchair. Ed had never painted before he came to the Northeast Center, and now he couldn't stop. I bought the painting from him and then I bought two more. I couldn't stop either. Ed was happy, but I was obssessed. Every time I came to see Rich I first made a beeline for the art studio. Ed's work was changing. The rooftops of his houses resembled the ears of a cat, and he began painting cats' heads floating in the sky above the houses. The hills got blacker, and Ed began painting huge crosses looming over the landscape in a dark sky. These paintings were frightening and beautiful. It wasn't enough to own a few of Ed's paintings, it was as if each piece was supposed to be mine, and when I became embarrassed at how many I was buying I bought them for my friends. Another painter at the center always drew three women—different colored pens or pencils, different faces, clothes—but always three women. I picked one, and then I realized it wasn't enough. Her work was about many versions of three women, and I wanted my experience of her art to be closer to hers. I bought half a dozen wonderful drawings.

I didn't know it right away, but a new world had just opened up. I read an article in the
New York Times
about Bill Richards and his studio at the Northeast Center, and I learned that other institutions had art programs, and that this kind of work is called Outsider Art. I found books, and began to learn a little. The term Outsider Art generally refers to self-taught artists, very often these are people who live on the margins of society, but it has its roots in the art of the insane, first noticed in Europe the late nineteenth century and then celebrated in the first half of the twentieth, by the artist Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet named it Art Brut, raw art. He championed it as the real thing, art unpolluted by society's expectations or a culture's constrictions. This was art that came straight from the psyche without a filter. The artists were the mentally ill—men and women in insane asylums—and they used whatever medium was at hand. One man made sculpture out of chewed bread; another, Adolf Wölfli, received a pencil and two pieces of blank newsprint every Monday, and he worked obsessively until there was nothing left but the bit of lead held between his fingernails. His drawings are complex, but the same good-humored face is staring out at the observer in all of them.

Insane
was a word that had always terrified me. An aunt suffered from schizophrenia before anybody talked about such things openly, before there was understanding let alone help; her condition had scared me to death. I was there once when her voices and visions had set upon her, and the desperate look on her face as she tried to appear normal was terrible to see. I thought I knew that look. I was afraid I would go crazy someday too.

My aunt had been a classics scholar. She had beautiful ancient things—small clay birds so light they barely rested on the palm, wonderful old coins, statues of horses, and thin figures made of copper from Etruscan graves. She gave us presents, I got a ring with a cameo of the god Bacchus, grapes in his hair; one of my sisters got a brooch with the head of Medusa. Years later, when my sister was in her late forties, she mentioned that she'd had a run of bad luck and wondered if it had to do with the Medusa. She didn't want it anymore. Send it to me, I said, I can handle it, I love old stuff. So she did. How bad can it be? I thought.

It was very bad. The pain in the Medusa's face was unbearable to look at. I showed it to a friend who held it on her palm. "It feels warm," she said, and gave it right back. Bad juju. I didn't want to sell it, the money given in exchange might be unlucky too, so I wrapped it up carefully and sent it anonymously to the Metropolitan Museum. You're crazy, friends told me, but they never saw the face.

My aunt liked to draw. I remember one summer my sisters and I were all to sit for our portraits, and I did so most unwillingly, the intensity of her gaze was disconcerting. I'd give a lot to see those drawings now—what did she make of us?—but they disappeared. Other days she made pencil sketches of bony faces, more shading than line, with sharp cheekbones and hostile eyes. I never liked them, but they fascinated me. There are three that survived her tumultuous life and I have kept them. Now I stare at the drawings of Adolf Wölfli, a man institutionalized for most of his life; I am humbled, and awed. My poor aunt. She jumped from a window more than thirty years ago. I take her drawings out of the box and look again.

There are enormous holes in my education. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I've never read
Moby-Dick
and it's probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I've learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don't have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don't have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don't feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don't feel like an outsider—to fall in love I only need eyes.

I began to buy more and more. From a gallery I bought a short-legged horse drawn in crayon on old shirt cardboard, the words
Jesus Wept
in the lower left-hand corner, one of four such drawings that had hung in the bedroom of a sharecropper's cabin. I loved the horse immediately, but when I found out where it had come from, everything got personal. I imagined a woman, heavy and tired. I tried to imagine the cabin she'd lived in, I wondered how big it was, and what kind of bed she'd slept in. Electricity or candles or kerosene? I saw a sagging front porch and inside a threadbare blanket hung to cordon off the bedroom, but then I remembered four drawings, and thought four walls. I wondered whether the floor was wooden or dirt, and then in the middle of conjuring nothing but poverty, I looked again at the words
Jesus Wept
written in beautiful old-fashioned script. And I realized I knew nothing.

From a man at the Northeast Center I bought words that went down the page in three columns: agonized proposals of marriage; I bought a page covered with letters of the alphabet, drawn in pencil by a man who was afraid he was going to forget how to write. Among the letters are numbers and what look like sketches of houses, and slanted lines that remind me of snow fences leaning away from an imaginary wind. I bought the message of a man who suffers from left neglect, a condition in which brain injury has rendered invisible the left side of everything. His words start in the middle of the page, and go off to the right, writing over and over until there is nothing but a black unreadable mass, the only parts still legible are the two original words:
FORGIVE ME.

"Look at this, look at this." I used to grab everyone who came to my apartment and take them on a tour whether they liked it or not. "This is by Sybil Gibson, she began painting when she was in her fifties and it started out as wanting to make her own wrapping paper and then she couldn't stop," or, "This is by an unemployed construction worker who was on the streets and he wandered into a church and they gave him paint and brushes and paper and he began painting and look!" Mostly I got patient smiles and blank looks. Then I went with my sister to the Outsider Art Fair, which is held every year at the Puck Building in New York City, and all around I saw people with the same crazed excited expression that was on my face. I bought a painting of black and white whales in a dark blue sea. I bought a scratching of the human form with letters streaming from its genitals. I bought a bunch of flowers that after I got it home and hung it up reminded me of two big purple toes and was shortly thereafter consigned to the closet. On the corner of Broadway and 111th Street, I bought four paintings of a spaceship hovering above the Statue of Liberty. The colors are vivid—violets, blacks, blues, yellows, reds. The way the disk is descending reminds me of the Annunciation, only in this case the angel Gabriel is a spaceship and the Virgin Mary is the Statue of Liberty. I think I remember the painter hinting that he had once been abducted, but I might have made that up.

I bought flowers painted on paper bags and buses painted on pieces of wood, and farm scenes painted on the six panes of an old window frame. I bought the terrifying scribbles of a schizophrenic. I bought art by famous outsider artists like Thornton Dial and Sybil Gibson and Justin McCarthy and Clementine Hunter. I bought anonymous art from psychiatric institutions, art from drug programs where the artist uses only his first name. I bought art off the street, from galleries, from big Outsider Art shows, from artists themselves. Over my desk I have hung the work of Southern artist J. B. Murry, an illiterate prophet who wrote in his own kind of hieroglyph—"spirit writings"—and then read aloud what he wrote by looking at the work through a glass of well water, an old African custom. From where I sit it resembles a topographical map, I see mountain ranges, lakes, rivers, each separate territory outlined in silver or black ink. I look at it all the time.

I didn't start writing until I was forty-seven. I had always wanted to write but thought you needed a degree, or membership in a club nobody had asked me to join. I thought God had to touch you on the forehead, I thought you needed to have something specific to say, something important, and I thought you needed all that laid out from the git-go. It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your own shoulder.
You idiot,
I would say to myself after half a page.
What makes you think you can write,
and then I'd crumple it up and aim for the wastebasket. Then one day somebody told me a story about a daughter at her mother's funeral, and something in the story caught in my mind and wouldn't let go of me. I tried to write it and failed, but instead of throwing it away (
you
idiot, give it up),
I tried again, from a different angle. I realized that I had been imitating the voice of the woman who told me the story, but it didn't ring true coming from me. I decided to make the funeral my own, and to imagine one of my daughters as the narrator, and after three hours I had three pages that I actually liked. I was off and running. For the first time a story was more important than my ego, and the know-it-all voice that told me not to bother held no sway.

That's the voice I need to banish every morning. I sit at my desk and stare at J. B. Murry's map, and the crayoned horse, and the red houses, and try to forget everything unnecessary—which is just about everything—so I can look around as if for the first time. Sometimes I think of it as waiting for an aquarium to settle. Hard to explain and harder to do, but I believe this much—wherever it is I have to get back to, these artists are already there.

Before I moved up here and began bringing Rich home, we went to Bill's studio every week. The studio is housed in a two-story atrium with a glass ceiling, and when it got hot, Bill put up a kind of tent/ awning over the long tables where people were working. When it rained you had to stop everything and marvel at the sound. I looked forward to the energy there,
I loved watching people work hard. I have never seen so much color in one place before or since. Everyone here has either brain injury or spinal cord injury resulting from accidents or strokes or degenerative diseases. There were people sitting at the long table, others working in wheelchairs, with special easels set at an angle; one man, a paraplegic, painting with a head-stick, who had painted the most beautiful green labyrinth made of running deer. Bill was everywhere at once, refilling paint trays, bringing more pencils, encouraging, taking the work so seriously that the artists did too. Bill wasn't teaching art, he was providing an atmosphere in which people could generate their own best work. Bill makes anything seem possible. It's a gift, a presence he has.

Rich did some drawing there, and sometimes he painted. The first thing was a duck—the figure he had always doodled. How about a few more? Bill suggested. Rich obliged, he drew another and another. Then his hand seemed to spring free, and began roaming the page in larger swoops and freer forms.

When Rich drew, I was excited.

" What's that?" I'd ask, looking at a lot of cross-hatching, and what looked like bridges, running figures.

" Well, that is two wizards, and those are the gulls and turtles protecting their habitat."

He drew a jaunty looking man in a straw hat, he drew soldiers. He drew an island with two palm trees bending in the wind, and some other odd-looking vegetation. From one tree hung a big sign that reads, "Welcome home Abby and Rich," then in the air next to it, "Welcome home you two globe-trotters." I love this drawing. Except it breaks my heart.

One afternoon Rich was drawing what looked to be a figure lying in the middle of a circle of tiny skyscrapers. I thought about the accident, his body lying in the street.

" What are you drawing?" I asked, heart in mouth.

"A clock," he said, and he drew another one, with numbers. Later he told me he'd spoken with his mother that morning. "I don't know what she makes of it all," he said.

" What all?" I asked, not reminding him his mother died years ago. Maybe he had spoken with her. I no longer know anything for sure.

"You live with a man for sixty-two years and then one day he doesn't appear.
Oh well.
Is that what you say?" Then he sighed.

But I had no answer for that.

Rich didn't always want to go to the studio, and once there he didn't always want to draw. We put clean paper and pencils and markers in front of him, sometimes he picked them up and sometimes he didn't. Once in a while, to get him started, I'd pick up a crayon or a Magic Marker but my attempts even to doodle were embarrassingly stiff. I was an imposter. I'm comfortable with words, it secures me to have a pen and notebook even if all I'm writing is
butter sugar milk eggs.
I looked around the studio, sopping up some of the energy in that room to take home with me. One afternoon I sat across the table from a young woman with short brown hair. She stared at a blank piece of paper, in front of her a box of freshly sharpened colored pencils. " What do you want to draw?" I asked. She didn't answer. I asked again and waited. "A face," she said finally, but she made no move. "Why don't you start with the eyes then?" I suggested. She chose a reddish brown pencil from the box and carefully drew a wavery brown line. She looked up. The nose, I suggested, another wavery line. The mouth. Soon there were a number of trembling lines on the page. You might not have known it was a face, but you knew something was going on, it hummed.