Out of the Gutter Art

Rejection. Have you experienced it? Most of us have, but has it scarred you for life? And can these life-long patterns, these ‘rejection tapes’ be erased? Overcome? Re-recorded?

This is my dilemma right now. Oh, I’ve spent years ‘working on’ this and thought I had ‘overcome’ this issue in many aspects of my life. But I’m as good at fooling myself as I am at plastering on a convincing smile to hide my inner turmoil from the world. Maybe better. Its been 2 years since I had a mental health advocate I really felt safe with…and her exiting my life has Hurt. Really bad. In writing this I am feeling this all over again, and it feels like rejection.

Yes, I understood that people move on, it had nothing to do with me, etc. Emotionally, though? At least she warned me it was coming. What does this have to do with my art? I’ll tell you: She believed in me, and hoped the best for me. She helped me see that I could work thru the pain of my past, and that poured out of me onto my canvases. With her at my back I shared my most intimate feelings and fears surrounding the abuse I had endured. And it was with her encouragement that I proudly stood at the opening reception of my first and only solo show, “Susan T. Martin: Through the Eyes of a Survivor” at the Morean Arts Center Gallery. Granted, it was a pop up show, but it was held during Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

I stood next to my soul-baring canvases bravely. It was huge for a girl who only started publicly showing her work at the age of 50. Who had hidden her work in closets and boxes for 40 years. Who quit showing her art to her family as a teenager after years of , ” That’s nice, dear.” and, ” Why don’t you paint flowers?”. My experiences had allowed me to build this wall against the surety of THE BIG REJECTION. Why try? Why expose my battered pride? Why?

So, after my big show I was fearless in sharing my work in the Art Heals show for survivors of sexual assault, My work, my voice and my story was used in advertisements for the Mental Health Facility where I received the counselling from aforementioned therapist. I was riding high, basking in the warmth of recognition.

Suddenly a worldwide pandemic came into our lives. All kinds of doubts and fears began to assault my mind. The isolation left me too deep in my own head and there were no meetings with any mental health counselors, except virtually. And those were few and far between. Finally a new therapist and I talked. We have never met in person, and in the past years we’ve spoken less than 10 times. I’m tired. I feel beaten.

And my prepped canvases leer at me, while I contemplate ripping up and burning all my old work. It’s more than my therapist leaving, it’s so much more. I have let a little woodworm of self-doubt ravage my confidence. I sit here and research the great masters, oil painting techniques, and all the formal art training I so long for; then I lay on the couch in a grey funk for days. I spent hundreds during this pandemic on entry fees for shows and now I lament not having sold anything. A great big pity party for the poor rejected artist. Sickening, isn’t it?

So, now that I have dumped all that ‘stuff’ out here on the page, maybe I can sit back and ponder it in black and white. And after I ponder, I’m going to get up and start a new day, free from it all.

Woe Is Me!

First I can’t Gogh and then I have to Gaugin!

I’m sorry, I just had to ‘go’ there. It is true. I am under compulsion to express myself creatively. It’s 5am again, sleep fled from me ten years ago (at least!), and I am drawing sheep instead of counting them. In my other journal I describe my physical pain-it is at a new level of cruelty. I lie on my bed and moan, no amount of useless meds suffice to touch this beast.

Is that why the faces all show this somehow tense+sad expression? Wistful longing for that elusive loosening of the bonds? Perhaps. I try to draw them less like who I see in the mirror, more like I imagine my ancestors to be. Those “other” Keel’s, in the ‘colored’ graveyard. The ones listed before 1865 as slaves who seem to disappear into thin air on the ‘new and improved’ census after the war. Mysteriously reappearing as ‘household servants’-female, age 10 years. Female, age 17…

I thought it was a lark, looking up ‘my people’…amazed that my dirt poor, shoeless, hog farming grandpas had come from England a few generations prior, settling in “The Colony” , with names prefixed with titles like Lord and Sir.

Such noble men and women whose blue blood runs thru my veins. How naive I was, never considered the blood on their hands. Native peoples whose entire lines and tribes now blotted out of existence, as their lands got hacked and sawed and planted with Tobacco, and cotton.

I always thought how beautiful brown skin is, and wished I were a black or brown skinned girl. Now I cry because I may actually be here because a child was hurt, a young woman stolen from every semblance of loving kindnes… Ah well…

I color an imaginary scenario with so much room for uncertainty… I will just let it be for now.

n

The Curling Tendrils

All around me , I see the memories. The whispers of my love, echoed through the years. Images of the place we lived, when all of us were there. Those times are over now, and isolation makes the distance so much greater. But still the tendrils curl from the past and steal under the door frames, thru the cracks in the walls, and deep into my heart.

In waking moments, bleary eyed, I try to grasp the essence of you as the dream recedes. Your scent lingers in my nostrils; recedes like the white foam of a wave vanishing into the eager sand. Why must the imprint flee-so rapidly? I had your housecoat in a Kipling, sealed like a time capsule. I would unzip it just enough to stuff my face in the hole, wuffling your smell for a moment; your baby again.

Eventually the Mommy smell dissipated in spite of me only wuffling for a second every month or so. Even this part of you had to go, leaving me only your favorite T Shirt (which I only put on once in the past 11 years only to whisk it off and ceremoniously nestle it back into its shrine in my pajama drawer.) It’s the one with the tiny writing decoration: Read a book. In your favorite place. By a window. Under a tree…ad infinitum in line after line of script. Script I can recite as if it were an incantation to bring you back to me.

It can’t. It won’t. It doesn’t. I still won’t wear it. It has your name hand written on the inside of the neck hem. I wrote it there before brining it to the rehab with your other clothes and toiletries. You looked so young, so childlike on the big bed in that old rehab. Giggling because you had the room to yourself. The first time in 50-odd years of oppressive marriage that you slept in a room alone. A little girl, playing house.

My heart hurts, but I have that image of you, right now, to comfort me. My eyes are heavy; I will lie down, curling my body around this memory…