Author: Joy Murray

I took part in  #metoo, a campaign on facebook to speak out if you’d ever been sexually harassed, abused, or assaulted.  I searched around in the photos of my drawings and paintings for an appropriate self-portrait that spoke to my troublesome and strange history.

I made this collage in 2016.  It’s made from handmade paper and paper torn from my journals.  I’d been in a writing workshop on remembering and re-framing the stories of our families, or our history.  I tried to speak, in a round-about way, to the abuse in my family, and the struggles of dealing with a body that doesn’t work properly — the many ways I’m broken but still held together by words and images and the support of friends.  How I can be a content person, but still hold onto painful knowledge.  How I can be melancholy but playful.

One of the many side effects of growing up in a family where there was sexual abuse is silence.  You don’t tell.  You don’t know how to tell.  And no one wants to hear it, much less believe it.  When you break free from the constraints of that family, you still keep quiet about it.  When other’s are sharing their family stories, telling of adventure and love, of misunderstanding and reconciliation, you keep quiet.  If you tell, a silence will settle over the room, shock, sometimes deep sympathy, but the whole mood of the conversation changes and it feels like you’ve sucked all the happiness out of the room.

(I notice I slipped into a passive voice for this last paragraph.  I think maybe I should change it to collective voice “we,” but really I can only speak for myself.)

I’ve learned to speak for myself by writing fiction and drawing pictures.  My art practices aren’t directly about sexual abuse  because I don’t want to dwell in it.  If I dwell in it, I don’t dwell in the rest of this rich and robust world.  I’m grateful I’m not naive.  I’m grateful I can recognize, sometimes, the behaviors of a child who is battling what I went through.  I tell stories.  I make narrative art.  I try to honor the courage it takes to survive and not let others steal your happiness. I encourage others to do so

But I don’t always know what I’m doing.

When I made that collage, at first I liked it a lot.  But as it stared out of my wall, I began to think I got it all wrong.  It was naive and cluttered and too personal.  What was I thinking?  I tried adding a new layer to it, but only made it worse.  I moved it under the bed thinking I’d reuse the canvas one day.

But when I moved to Memphis last spring, I threw it away.

So I was surprised to find that I thought it was a good image for #metoo, and others identified with it.  I remember now that when I first posted it on facebook last year, when I still liked it, it got a better response than I expected.  It speaks to others.  It tells a tale that needed telling, even if it’s interpreted by others in different ways than I intended.

I only have a small digital image of it now, but it’s enough to make card sized prints of it.

I’m going to put a postcard of it on the wall of my studio to remind me not to toss things out.  I judge my work harshly and hate all of it at first.  That’s why I like working in a journal.  I can hide what I’m doing from myself.  It’s a kind of bi-polar process, create, show it to everyone, then look back in horror.

I have coined a term for the period of time when I hate my work — post-artum depression.

I try to give myself at least a month before I trash something.  But it isn’t always a safe guard.  And I get existential and feel that nothing really matters anyway, it’s all just clutter.  Is this a side-effect of toxic family or depression or just something unique to me?

But when I look around me, when I look through my art files, when I see the long trail of stories in many forms I’m leaving behind me, I feel good that I’ve mostly overcome the silence and shame imposed on me as a child.  It will always be a struggle to speak, but I will.   I can.  I do.

I will.

Any comments and shares are greatly appreciated.

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How do I know when an idea is a good one?  How do I know if I’m communicating a coherent image?  How do I know when a painting or story is finished?

I have a bad habit of revising stories to death and not knowing when to quit when I’m painting.  I get in a frame of mind where I feel like I have to correct and correct all my mistakes.  I feel like I can never quite get it right, can’t represent the shining idea in my head, but only futz around until I give up.

Is that my process?  I do eventually create things, and they do eventually stand on their own.  With all their flaws, I send them out into the world.

This painting started as an idea that occurred to me when I took a life story class.  I realized I am not just myself.  I am made up of all the family, good and bad, that came before me.  I am also not the end of the story.  I am in my children and they are my bit of immortality, a continuation of story that didn’t start with me and will never end.  And even if I hadn’t had children, I am in the life of everyone I know and love.  They are in me.  My best parts will be remembered and carried forward.  We are all upcycled elements that will continue to grow up and out and into infinity.

I drew this little piece in my journal:

I then did a more detailed drawing using watercolor pencils and thinking about color and life.

As I drew this self-portrait, I thought a lot about my disability, my broken body.  How do I represent it as a metaphor, not realistically, but how it feels.  The immobility and how it feels that I can’t move about in the way other people do.  I feel rooted and immobile.  But in that rooted place, I have lived such a full life.  Life has moved through me in rich and rewarding ways.  I decided to do a big painting on canvas.

I hung it up in my studio/bedroom.  I saw it before I went to sleep and when I woke up.  Something didn’t seem right.  I wasn’t happy with the downward hand, and the lack of definition of the plant moving into that hand and out the other.  And the glow I feel wasn’t there.  And my crookedness wasn’t visible enough.

I’ve been watching a lot of videos by Gwenn Seemel, a wonderful artist that I love, who is very generous with her process and shows her many revisions.  She layers and adds color and lets her paintings flow, glow and grow.

So I decided to let my painting grow, too.  I layered over it, changed the position of the lower hand, added to the humped back of my tree figure, then added the aura, the glow I feel as I think of how life passed through me.

I hung the revised painting in my studio/bedroom.  I saw it before I went to sleep and when I woke up.  And it didn’t bother me anymore.  It said what it needed to say.

I deepened colors.  I made the title more visible.  I added iridescent paint, that shows up as a sort of grainy white in these photos.

This painting may be only a personal statement that no one else relates to. but I’m glad I moved forward with it.  When I see it on the wall, I feel less alone, that in spite of or maybe because of my disability, there is vitality in me that it’s taken me a life time to recognize.  I finished the early painting on my 57th birthday, and the revision a month later.

Now when I look at it, I wonder about ways to revise the image of bodies that have been twisted and reshaped by life.  How to capture the vitality and beauty and light of survival.  For all it’s flaws, it’s a catalyst for future ideas.  Isn’t that where new ideas come from — the old mistakes give birth to the new ideas?

It’s a good thing to meditate on as a I wander my way through the next year.

I got to go see the Brent Kington exhibition at the Metal Museum down on the Mississippi River bluff.  Their grounds are amazing with lovely views or the river and lots of sinuous sculptures, railings, gates and gazebos.  It wasn’t too hot, just warm and breezy.  I saw a few monarch butterflies and other flying creatures as I wandered the grounds with a good friend.

Brent Kington’s work was amazing.  He had a very playful side and made little toys and charms, including a necklace with removable parts for his wife to keep the kids occupied when they were supposed to be quiet.

“L. Brent Kington is best known for his whimsical toys and tabletop and large scale kinetic sculptures. Less well known is the collection of jewelry he created over the course of his life. These jewelry pieces were gifts for his wife, mother, daughter and sister-in-law and often referenced his sculpture.”

I can’t find any good images of his work to share, but if you google his name, you’ll get a good idea of his vision and whimsy.  He likes long noses and birds and beaks and organic shapes.

The exhibit included some of his handmade cards that he made for loved ones.  He did such delightful caricatures that they printed one on the show program.

Today, I decided to do a copycat caricature of myself in his style.  I’d worn my favorite Hawaiian shirt, so I had to do mine in color.  It’s so good for my soul when I see art that makes me smile and not take myself too seriously.

The exhibition of Kington’s work is up until October 15.  I hope you get a chance to see it.

The remnants of Hurricane Harvey fell as cooling rain in my neighborhood.  I watched it pelt my bougainvillea, the flowers fluttering under the weight of fat raindrops.  It was hard to enjoy it while knowing how much destruction this weather had caused, ruining great swathes of cities and drowning our neighbors to the south.  But I did.  I ate a bowl of hot soup, the window open, the breeze shooing out the stale air, filling the apartment with its sweetness.

I would gladly suffer more heat and humidity if it meant that the devastation hadn’t happened.  I expect August to be unbearable.  I expect in September for the summer to linger and sweat us — to live in air-conditioning and complain.  But this weather arrived.  Unbidden.

I scrape a small donation from my small budget for the hurricane victims.

Then I go out and enjoy this undeserved gift of rain.