Mother Bones

You’ve spent three years painting larger-than-life scale people in park settings – Your Urban Park series capturing the urban feel of Seattle parks. You’ve painted your subjects in striped t-shirts, cut-off jeans, bathing suits, running shoes. Painted bling and cigarettes. You painted a couple eating popsicles. Painted a couple arguing. A couple sitting by the lake. Many like these. Twenty-six paintings in all. Several commissions. Many shows.

You’re ready to push the boundaries of your art.
What if you paint the essence of people? Remove their identity? Make them abstract? Make them universal?

What if you pierce the adorned body parts? Dig underneath the skin through layers of brain and brawn?

Down to the bones.

You begin with pencils on paper.
You plunge head-first into graphite – the way you dive deep when you write. You bury yourself in the act of drawing.

Shapes resembling bones.
Dead bones. Live bones. Luminescent bones.
Bones with nodules illuminated.
Illuminated nodules and spurs highlighted.
Bones flying, floating bones pushing, pulling, singing and howling.
Long bones, hip bones, finger bones, backbones.

Dancing – white against black – drawn and shaded ribbons and knotted fabric penciled into swirls that kiss the edge of a bone.
Or vices that bind two bones together.
Or slings protecting two bones from falling.
Or jaws that pry bones apart.

You draw the dynamics of family.
Their baggage. Illusions. Delusions.
Their Distractions.
Their pain and their joy.

You dive deeper than dreams
Into the graphite ground
Burnt black as magic is black
The color of death.
You find bones in the dark and morbid underground
Waiting for you – memories of foul play.

Bones. Hear them clack as they bump one another. Making noise. Watch ribbons ripple and fly, hear the stretch of fabric just before it rips and snaps. Hear the grunts from tension and the whoosh as bones fall. Feel the burden of heavy loads. Hear the crumpling paper, the buzzing of fan shapes, the flirtations of bone fragments. Feel the weight. Feel the perishable peeling away of graphite layers rubbed out to create chaos at the edges.

A suite of drawings finished.
Now you paint. Paint on canvas with a fan brush.
A larger field.
An excavation site.

Mix complementary colors – ultramarine purple and yellow ochre.
Tinge bones dug from earthen graves the color of dried dirt.
Paint the light snagged by bone gnarls and bring them alive with white.
Then plow into your psyche and dig for more bones.
Dig deep into the dark dead earth and uncover the mother-bones
Mother-bones haunting you.

The other day you woke early
With another lucid dream –
The sort that feels so real you question
The reality of wakefulness.
Your mother called and said she needs you to go to her.
She needs you to cook for her.
She’s just too sick.
She begged.
You said no.
You woke remembering you said no.
You knew what it meant to cook for her.
It meant she is hungry.
It meant she needs to feed off of you again.
You said no.

There was once meat on your bones.
Meat that made you strong.
The kind of meat mothers feast on.
Suck on until nothing is left but bare bones.

You can’t separate the bones – hers from yours.
You paint them all.
All your female archetypes.
Every dead writer, dead painter, every dead mother and daughter.You plop gobs of paint on your palette –
Gobs of buttery paint luscious enough to lick
Like a Wayne Thiebaud painting of pie.

Alizarin Crimson, Viridian Green, Ultramarine Blue mixed
To form a near-black not quite the color of death.
This is your ground. Fill in the spaces between the bones
With a number 10 hog-hair bristle brush.
Let the tortured female bones lay on top
Alive with your nightmares.

In the meantime, you reach the semi-finals for Seattle’s Best with your Urban Park Paintings. Swedish Hospital buys two of your large paintings and two pastels for the new hospital cancer wing. The art curators for Seattle’s Best like the work you submitted from your slides. But during their visit to your studio they notice your bone paintings. Your shifting focus confuses them. They reject you.

You are crestfallen. Should you have stayed in the safe zone? Made a name for yourself? Become a caricature of yourself? Stunt your growth? To get into the finals of Seattle’s Best?

Fuck them. You’re onto something.
Bones identify. They tell the tales.
They have a voice. A loud voice.
You hear your childhood torment in these bones.
You hear Mother bones wail.

-WOW-Women On Writing 2^nd Place Contest Winner 4^th Qtr 2021