My Own Quiet Room
"Yeye (Ships That Sailed)" by Ara Deinde
You might be in love, but you are trying to tiptoe. November, years ago: it is early morning, and the man in your bed is sleeping; he has been so tired lately. Outside it has been winter for several centuries, and yet it’s only just begun—overcast, muck, bare trees. The fields a dull brown, almost grayscale. You’re still here: Moscow, Idaho, the college you recently graduated from, the town where you grew up, and every winter grows longer, darker. You make coffee for yourself and pull a packet of tea from the cupboard, place it carefully in a mug on the counter without unwrapping it. You arrange it in such a way that it’s the first thing he’ll see when he wakes, opens your bedroom door to the kitchen. You tear a banana from the bunch and put it there too.
These are long nights. You worry he’ll sleep through his alarm, wonder if you should stay—you’re due at the café in 20 minutes. You hear him stir. Through the crack in the door, you see he’s facing you now, curled up in your sheets, his face reddened by the heat of sleep. He is your very best friend.
At work, serving bacon and eggs to impatient professors and students with hangovers of varying severity, you wonder if he is awake yet. You wonder if he’ll have enough time to go home, shower, change, before nine. You wonder if he’ll eat the food you put out for him, if he’ll eat anything before starting the day. Maybe he can be a few minutes late; maybe his boss at the printshop won’t mind. You wonder if he’s walking across the creaky floor of your apartment imagining you walking across the creaky floor of the café, filling in all your specifics like you fill in his—the bad tattoo on his wrist, the falling apart soles of his nicest shoes, his adamant opinions on punk rock, dadaism, a dry brine.
***
It is such a short distance from one’s own self to overtaken, rapt; the potential of my own eager self-abnegation lies dormant in everyone. “I only meant to be kind,” writes Susan Sontag. “But now I have become a fraud, and I feel imposed on, oppressed by him.” I could love him into loving me, I have thought so many times, and tried.
It is summer in Brooklyn; it is many years later; it is almost evening. My inner thighs are spotted with friction-made pimples from sweating in cut-off shorts. This is the place I arrived after Moscow. After Oakland, after Boise, after drifting in between for weeks at a time. The whole city feels like it’s standing over a Subway grate, but in it people are crossing the street, passing a basketball, dropping an ice cube down a shirt. Two kids are really playing in the water spewing from a fire hydrant. With whom to share this.
Lately the acute desire to know someone—the casual movements, thoughtless placements of limbs that exist only within that small corral of intimacy. I have been playing in my head inaccurate and impossible movie scenes starring hotter and more emotionally available versions of myself and various men I have known or slept with or seen once walking down the street. We embrace, we press each other against a wall, we eat dinner together and fall asleep early. I’m lonely. I want to be with someone.
No. I want a room of my own, I am always wanting a quiet room. An immutable I.
In Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, she writes that “the most womanly problem is not giving oneself enough space or time, or not being allowed it.” My self warped around the various hims of the past. But I do not want space or time; I want to be pressed against him; I want to be one among others; I want to be kind. I want two toothbrushes on the counter, a designated side of the bed, to taste soup from a spoon someone holds out toward me. I want two people together in a room.
Is mine a chosen solitude or an involuntary one? I have no patience for the slow alight of intimacy, or no one to tempt me toward those reckless wasted hours on which love insists—everyone is unbearable to me; it must be my own evaluations that are defective. But if there was someone—smart enough or considerate enough or tall enough—I would gladly waste them all.
“One can never be alone enough to write,” claims Sontag. And yet, the unbearable corridors loneliness erects.
***
Of the painter Alice Neel’s subjects, Ara Osterweil writes that they are “always in the thick of relationality, even when alone.” Neel painted the inhabitants of New York City—marginal identities often excluded from museums in paintings or in person, people like all people: abstract, impenetrable, contradictory, complex. She rejected the term “portrait,” and instead referred to her work as “pictures of people.” A collector of souls, she called herself—souls which resided in colorful and crooked and dynamic and expansive and unruly bodies.
Neel transforms realism beyond its precise limitations—here a bare foot is warped and cartoonish, a flushed face is bright pink, the curve of a cheekbone is exaggeratedly uneven. She prioritizes honesty—an accurate portrayal of the inarticulabilities of an individual—over exactitude. In a New York Times piece published in 1976, she quotes Keats to describe her painterly ethos: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” “I paint to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life.”
The figures and faces in Neel’s paintings maintain a certain fluidity—there is movement in these canvasses; a sense of the patterned answering and unanswerings of life. Colors are bright and blocky, brushstrokes thick and definite. A particular messiness is what initially drew me to these paintings—a messiness that seems adjacent to a feminist rejection of traditional beauty standards, but maybe more accurately is an invention of a new form of beauty—truth, and beauty.
Is this messiness connected, somehow, to Osterweil’s assertion of relationality in Neel’s work? Osterweil makes room for the space beyond the canvas, suggesting less the reductive cliché that relegates a woman’s work to her biography and introducing, instead, an expansiveness to the work, a boundaryless relationship between an artist and her art. Neel painted real people, not their abstractions. When her subjects sat for her, she formed relationships with them, conversing constantly in an attempt to know them, to capture that knowing in the portrait. “I leave myself and go into that person,” she said. At times she would become so invested, so much a part of them for the brief period of time they sat in her living room that she experienced an acute loss when, eventually, the painting was finished and the subject left. “I feel like an untenanted house.”
***
You are sitting in a booth, knee pressed against the knee of a serious man with dark hair and a certain tenderness in his eye as he watches you scoop chicken onto your fork with your finger. The early taunts of spring. You’ve been together a year now. Periodically, you wave at friends passing by outside—this corner of Oakland is small, neighborly, everyone you know frequents the same bars.
Later, you walk back to his place together. Bare trees in the darkish city night. Standing at the sink, you fill two glass jars with water, reach out to hand one to him, but he’s putting his shoes back on, saying he’s got to meet a friend to go over a new verse that just popped into his head. You imagine his fingers traveling the neck of his guitar, repeating the pattern again and again in his friend’s living room. You do not ask him to stay; you do not ask him for anything—you understand. You want to protect his freedom, not impose upon it, not stand in the center of it interrupting, demanding, wanting.
Unlike him, you are guided only by your desire’s wavering concerns—his hands, his low voice in your ear, the unsteady future of your own fingers tracing long lines across his skin. You are too tired to do anything, half-drunk off the bottle of wine you’d shared, and distracted anyway by the competing specters of his presence, absence. You wish you were like him. Watching the headlights of passing cars sweep shadows across the room, suddenly you are only a woman waiting for him in the dark.
***
In Neel’s work, the interpersonal becomes subject, whether within the frame of a group portrait; symbolized by an individual’s political or domestic (both endeavors of collectivism) labor; or simply suggested by the deeply known quality of the painted person by the painter, a result of Neel’s long and intimate sittings with her subjects. The “backbreaking freedom” associated with the idea of male genius gets revised under Neel’s careful eye: this is freedom without the austerity of individualism; freedom of expression, freedom of self, the freedom of being known— sinuously, wholly but never quite—the freedom one self can extend to another.
I think that it is through this sense of community that the self in Neel’s paintings is seen, known, made real. Neel grants this steadiness to her subjects—and art does this: makes an artifact of what is fleeting and vague—by inviting them to be themselves (she was known to for her incessant chatter—an attempt to relax her subjects) and then capturing these moments of openness in paint. What does it mean to be known? Neel’s paintings a veil dropped between the private self and the public self, thinly.
***
How rare Neel’s interest in interdependence is in the mythology of artists. The glorified creative genius is a man; is driven and undistracted; is loosened, at a distance, from the responsibilities of the body, relationships, the endless repetitions of domestic chores. Ambition a masculine trait, ascetic and cold. The male artist lives in service of his art, which is always an austere, lonely endeavor—“a way of life,” writes Rachel Cusk in The New York Times Magazine, “in which the niceties of femininity—both given and received—are relinquished in favor of a crucial but backbreaking freedom.”
This is a man I have loved, known, admired. How easy it seemed for him to separate himself from whim and comfort, from me. I arranged for myself a desk, piled all my books on it, and forced myself to sit there stretched over the chasm of afternoon to evening like a rickety bridge. Waiting for dinnertime. When I tried to be like him, I got hungry; later, when I tried to be different from him, the opposite of him, I got lazy and bored, restless.
***
It is blustery, and my mother is asking what’s going on. She is calling from Moscow—quiet hills for several miles between her and the town you left for the chaos and movement of this city, someone yelling at the construction worker across the street, something about the noise and a parking ticket.
It’s just a little windy, you say, but then a loud motorcycle rumbles past and you must explain the new sound.
She wants to know how the date was. You offer the anecdote about his tattoo—a sun and a moon, and they’re both smiling, he’d said in the crowded bar where after two drinks he’d rested a hand on your thigh, because in life it’s important to always stay positive. Your mother finds this endearing, so you leave out the part about inviting him back to your apartment.
It has been several long seasons of aloneness—nearly five years now since my last relationship—and still this pull toward solitude: soft light in a quiet room in the middle of this fast city. The slow labor of writing cannot exist simultaneously with people and talking and a little music rounding out the edges. Either this is the reason for my singlehood or the result of it.
What I cannot seem to reconcile, I want to tell her but don’t—some fundamental misunderstanding, always, between us—is the creative life with the relational life—the give of love, kindness. To be in relation to an other is to be pliable, compromising. To write is to sit alone in a room.
But I get so caught up—lovers, friends, strangers drifting through the park. Dying to have my foot tucked beneath a thigh at all times; my common, flimsy desires, and how unwieldy they become, rendering me distractible and desperate when what I meant to be was my own enclosed self. The fear that such effusion, this constant want, inhibits my capacity to be immersed in, obsessed with art—to be an artist.
Though lately I feel very far from the version of myself who wanted only to sit on the couch with him, calf reddened by the press of his knee. Who’s knee? Maybe this iteration of boundless desire was just a moment in time, lost to me now. I am so wholly alone. All day I open dating apps, swipe bitterly, cynically, through strangers. You chat halfheartedly with a few of them, imagining pretty little futures for the two of you until they return in your mind to just distraction, an interruption, a deep pool and I a smudged penny turning, turning toward the bottomless bottom. I stop replying.
I think she is dismayed, my mother, to find herself with a daughter so unsociable, so quick to judge, and difficult.
“If to be with people is to be socialized, to submit your rough edges to the whetstone of others’ desires,” writes Emily Cooke in a 2012 article in The New Inquiry, “to be asocial is to be ragged and, thus, original.”
How expansive, voluptuous I become only in solitude.
Still, how lonely.
The previous night, 4 AM, staring at the books on the bedside table, watching the titles blur. Willing sleep to come, willing morning to come and your date to climb over you, his tattooed forearm taut holding up his torso, collect his clothes off the floor and leave. How unexceptional and mundane it was: facing away from him, you half-slept or pretended to, he reached and inside you. You said nothing, rolled your eyes, turned reluctantly to face him. Though you were sore, tired.
***
I’ve been thinking about Neel’s outlines. The clear strip of black or blue paint that fence in these bodies. The lines are inexact—curved, broken, drawn over. It’s a starting point: the body starts here. Or: the world starts here. Whereas I am always either too enclosed or not enclosed enough, unsure where my own edges are, or how to maintain them.
This barrier between the body and the background—some sense of differentiation; a containment. Is this a defense, or could it be more just definition—legibility, clarity? A body which maintains the shape of itself while the background swirls and fades. A self clearly delineated is perhaps not so much cordoned off from other people or separate from the world around it as it is identified within (despite?) these varying gazes.
***
These are weightless yet interminable days—I am in-between, staying with my mother and stepfather in Moscow, a gorgeous whoosh of greens and golds this time of year, almost harvest. I have three days left on the lease of an empty apartment in Boise and a one-way plane ticket to New York in ten days. I have the aisle seat. Soon I will live in an unimaginable city; soon I will be unimaginable there in it.
Now, reading at a table outside—heat, thick smoke—drinking hot coffee which I love for that warmth ironed onto the warm air, sweating at the café I’d worked at in college. The metal chair carving a diamond pattern into my bare thighs, the stone apartment building on the other side of the playground rising above me—an old crush once lived on the third floor, and I remember the constant awareness of him there, always wondering if he was glancing out the window, if he could see you stacking these very chairs, snaking the cord through the armrests and clicking the lock closed, or now or now or now.
“I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another,” writes Andrea Long Chu in Females: A Concern, which I just bought at the bookstore a few shops down, the one that used to be cluttered with stacks of used books but is now shiny with coordinated hardwood.
I am waiting for my ex-boyfriend to walk by, his apartment just down the street—waking there once, late summer, in the shower his tongue against your nipple, your hands hesitant in the steamy air around him; you were hungry, you wore a red shirt, in memory the scene is imbued with a hot and tangible brightness—or any of the other men I’ve fucked or loved here, almost all of them. Always here I find myself lingering downtown, waiting, glancing up eagerly every time someone passes.
An abandonment of the interior, my desires skewing out at odd angles. I suppose this defines desire—external, a reaching outward. Perhaps my problem is I continually forget it’s my own self doing the reaching, or is it? The fault lines of love, how commonly it seems my “I” has nothing to do with it—unconsensual want; what I wanted was a quiet room, and suddenly I’m waiting for him there.
Chu: “The self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.”
***
What are the stakes of this essay? I ask myself today. Two days after Christmas, cold, a new surge of the virus keeps us trapped inside or gives me a good excuse to entrap myself. The testing site in Crown Heights has a line four blocks long. After I gave up waiting, I found two full-length mirrors leaning against a pile of garbage bags a block away and carried them home. I placed them in the hall where one of them now reflects my outline through the cracked open door. What is at stake? I ask her—serious expression, messy hair, the scrunched-up brow and slouch and several large sweatshirts.
My sister is sending photos of a penthouse suite in Minneapolis, where she and her boyfriend are staying with his parents for the holiday. She has just spent a week here, sharing a bed like you did as kids, walking through Midtown with your arms looped around one another. Now the grateful stillness of mid-winter, my bed unmade but my own, the days empty of entertainment, the pressure to do things. Returning to what seems a more expansive self, though yesterday you were walking long avenues through the city and now I’m not stretching my arms. The desk, the keys in the bowl, music from the café on the ground floor audible beneath the silent apartment. The relief of the hours becoming manageable, mine again.
In Adrienne Rich’s essay, “When We Dead Awaken,” she writes of the imaginative freedom necessary to making art, a freedom which is at odds with the “holding-back” and “putting-aside” required of women with husbands, friends, children, lovers—women in community, in relation. This is “womanly, maternal love, altruistic love, … selfless love.” But this is love, or I thought it was love, or I don’t know an alternative. To nurture, to put the other first—how easily and effortlessly that gift becomes a loss of the self, and yet, isn’t it this offering that makes love meaningful, precarious, real?
Rich clarifies that she does not mean to assert that a creative life requires a certain detachment from others, a “devouring ego,” in Cusk’s words. This choice between love and egotism—“a force directed by men into creation, achievement, ambition, often at the expense of others, but justifiably so”—is a false dichotomy, Rich insists. “This has been the myth of the masculine artist and thinker,” she writes. “I do not accept it.” But the alternatives within the confining hierarchies of heterosexuality and gender remain murky and unmapped.
Even platonic relationships seem predicated on some degree of compromise between the self and the other. “To be with” is not the unadorned prepositionless “to be.” But we are always in inadvertent relation with each other. How to understand a relationship as an addition to one’s subjectivity—and in this sense, an expansion of the self, an enlargement—rather than its erasure.
I think I meant to decide what I wanted, whether I could keep up the life of a roaming loner forever or if there was a way to maintain my solitude within a relationship, to resist abandoning the voluptuous detachment of aloneness when and if I no longer wanted to be entirely alone. To maintain my solitude while loving. To prove not necessarily that I am worthy of love, which may be its own tangential dilemma, but that I am capable of it—giving of the self; giving from the self—without losing track of this self that gives. Perhaps it is possible to be a subject who extends herself toward another.
Rich: “There must be ways … in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united. But … I always felt the conflict as a failure of love in myself.”
My sister and I in matching pajamas, Christmas morning, just sitting around, our legs crossed over each other’s. The two nights since she left, I haven’t slept. I tangle the sheets, shiver, switch pillows.
***
In Boise, you are living with your boyfriend, though it seems a little soon. Circumstances aligned—his friend is house-sitting for a family on sabbatical, there is all this extra space. You share a king-sized bed with purple sheets, and he’s helped you set up the extra room as an office. There are papers strewn across it, books. He works in the shed behind the house, spends all day there and late into the night. You rarely enter the space, afraid of interrupting, imposing, afraid your sudden presence there would only disrupt his careful brilliant tinkering, but when you do, you read the neon sticky notes arranged across the wall, ask him about the tape deck on the table, maneuver your clumsy awkwardness very carefully around the tripods and cameras. You do not ask to see the scene he’s been editing; you know he only likes to share when it’s perfect.
You sit at your desk staring at the bare branches until you get hungry. You make enough for two; he didn’t eat this morning. Eggs benedict—lemony hollandaise, spinach instead of ham, you’re out of bread so it’s sweet potato latkes underneath. He comes inside soon after you text a photo, takes the plate you’ve made for him. He kisses you, thanks you, says he would starve without you. He returns to the shed, and you eat at the table, the light orange through the brightly colored sheer curtains.
It’s all wrong—too rich, drenched in oil, fats that run together and congeal in my throat.
***
In 1925, Neel married Carlos Enríquez, a Cuban artist with whom she bore two daughters. Neel’s first daughter died of diphtheria, and shortly thereafter, Enríquez left for Havana with their second child, abandoning Neel alone in New York. The loss of both of her children left Neel devastated; she suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide twice. Most of her 30th year was spent in hospitals where she received psychiatric care and, eventually, was encouraged to paint again.
“I always had this awful dichotomy,” Neel said. “I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint” (The Guardian). Neel’s daughter remained in Cuba with her father’s family, and Neel stayed in New York. The two had minimal contact with each other for the remainder of their lives. The subject of one of a somewhat controversial painting of Neel’s which depicts the child fully nude staring boldly out of the canvas, Isabetta committed suicide in 1982, at the age of 54.
Eventually Neel gave birth to two sons, with two different fathers, born one year apart. She refused to stop painting while she acclimated to motherhood, opting to work at night after the children had gone to bed. Though Neel was able to continue painting throughout her sons’ lives, her dedication to her work, and the erratic lifestyle it inspired—or, as public funding for artists dwindled, required—at times meant deprioritizing a certain amount of stability for her children.
In Andrew Neel’s documentary about his grandmother, Alice Neel, he interviews his father and uncle about growing up with the famous artist. The men describe their mother’s rejection of societal norms, her early dismissal from the art world and subsequent poverty, and her volatile relationships. Richard, Neel’s oldest son, asserts his disdain for “bohemian culture.” “I think a lot of innocent people are hurt by it. I consider I was hurt by it.” (One must wonder, here, what a more robust government program for the arts and artists would have done to improve Neel’s quality of life, her ability to care for herself and her children. Is “bohemian culture” the enemy here, or is it the drastic decrease in funding for the arts that forces artists to choose between their work and economic security?)
Arguments between Neel and Sam Brody, the father of her youngest son, became physically violent, the abuse at times targeted at Richard. The financial instability Neel endured in pursuit of artistic freedom affected her family—after the termination of the Works Progress Administration in 1943, Neel relied on public assistance to support herself and her sons (Alice Neel), raising them impoverished to such a degree that Richard was malnourished for a period of his childhood (Artforum).
Despite the difficulties of being a single mother and an artist, Neel maintained both of these roles for the rest of her life. Her daughter-in-law, Ginny, posits that Neel’s ability to paint while mother has something to do with Neel’s home. An apartment on 108th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, Neel painted in the same rooms in which she raised her family. Homemaking as inseparable from artmaking.
Richard Neel on Alice: “It was a gift to have her as a mother. Certainly. No question about it.”
***
For a brief period of time, I was so sure. How firmly I opposed my initial attempts at the sacrificial ambition I’d misled myself into believing was a prerequisite to the creative life—adamant instead in my belief that art cannot or should not eclipse the essential work of building and maintaining relationships with friends, lovers, family, people, the arrogance of such a position.
I guess I am less certain now. I’ve started working at a restaurant in Brooklyn owned by a Long Island-based bartender and his son. The place is small, dark, infested with roaches, rats in the backyard, but the food is good, and I’ve started baking cakes because no one else wants to make dessert. Every night my coworkers migrate a few blocks down to a bar managed by a friend who often comes into the restaurant and orders several glasses of cranberry juice, no ice. They invite me along, but I can think only of the loudness, small talk, tomorrow’s hangover stripping the day of its hours. I imagine being there, an ambling conversation, a stranger, that certain understanding which always hangs glittering and possible between two people, so rarely attainable.
The next night I join in in search of it, having gained nothing from the prior evening’s lonely restlessness staring at my laptop screen and then going to bed. The bar is dim and warm, and the wet rings left behind lifted up drinks sparkle in the twinkling lights. Beneath the loud music is all the idle chatter of a neighborhood bar full of regulars, and I cannot follow any one conversation enough to become a part of it. I watch my coworker’s mouth move. I want to feel connected to these people who move through my days, who make jokes and ask if I’m okay when my section gets busy, but I’m floating farther and farther away. I thought I couldn’t bear another night at my desk facing down the endless impossibility of words, but it turns out I can’t bear this either.
At times I fear becoming the artistic geniuses I once admired, detached and oblivious to the changing of the seasons, self-contained to the point of egotism. Late summer both vibrant and suffocating, always loud. Bright leaves and taxis, the backwards glow of an OPEN sign reflected in a car window. I should spend the day walking very slowly through the park. I should notice where the grass ends and the dirt begins in a crooked circle around the trees at the park. Other times I think I should write it down.
***
I wonder if Neel’s bold borders aren’t a bit aspirant. The attention she paid to the people she painted gave them definition, established their borders. But then what of the painter. “I leave myself and go into that person.” Can we assume Neel wanted to be seen, understood, known, from the prevalence of these qualities in her work, how she extends so entirely this courtesy to others? Neel was so certain of her dedication to painting; I should not fill in the details of her biography with projections of my own insecurities, my competing desires; the work should, as they say, speak for itself.
Still. There is some evidence of desperation here. In the searing, steady gazes of her canvases and also her biography—her unstable health, her tumultuous relationships. Her art reveals the act of making it—the process, the room, the people, her hand, her body upright, her life. I want to know how to live.
***
It’s just, if I love him, he is always in my peripheral. I remember everything funny that happens in his absence so I can tell him about it. I always want to know what he’s doing, even if he is walking through the grocery store trying to decide between the cheaper eggs or the more ethical ones. And he just goes on as himself.
Halle agrees. Dim yellow lighting, the laminated cork of the countertop at the restaurant she works at in the West Village. Tan lines of passersby under streetlights. You are resting your cheek in the flat palm of your hand, and Halle’s glass is almost empty. The men we love do not think of us, it seems. They don’t call, they cancel plans; I love you, they say, but they come home so late.
The bartender refills your water glasses and you thank him.
Still, Halle says, I wouldn’t want to be different. To be thoughtful, considerate, to give—that’s what it means, I think, to be with someone.
How easy it is to disintegrate into a pattern of offerings and assimilations unintentionally, in the name of love. His love does not obliterate, does not eclipse himself, somehow, without meaning it to. But when does love slip away from an offering and into immolation; when does being-with lose its subjectivity. The attention and care that predicates love is essential, life-affirming. It is a labor which sustains, uplifts, gives. And gives. I do not want—I don’t think I want—a creative life at the expense of slicing several fresh apples thin, arranging them in a spiral shape atop a buttery crust because it is his favorite, because you love him, I do not want it.
***
As many working artists must do when forced into dire circumstances, Neel the made the sacrifices she deemed necessary for her portraits, for her people. It seems unfair to malign Neel for failing to provide her children with the stability of convention and money when the fathers of Neel’s sons played only vaguely supporting roles in their lives. And yet, Neel’s steadfast dedication to her painting—even the sittings and conversations and attempts at really seeing other people—made of herself a blankness, an absence for her children. While Neel’s interest in people is so undeniable in her work and the intimate settings that created it, beyond this abstract realm of ideas and images lie actual bodies—breakfast and bedtimes, the minutiae of the figures depicted on canvas. Neel seems far less interested in this world, though who can blame her. In my mind there is no doubt that Neel’s devotion to people was sincere, as is apparent in her art as well as her leftist politics, but there remain questions as to what this means, or meant to her.
Though Neel—unlike her son’s fathers—raised her two youngest children, did her erratic lifestyle and devotion to her work render her a “devouring ego”? Can her behavior be attributed to the mental illness she struggled with throughout her life? Is any claim of her failed maternity a misogynist accusation? How do Neel’s searching, trenchant depictions of people and bodies correlate to the physical world of people and bodies which require nourishment, maintenance, attention?
***
I reject this binary thinking—art and care work can coexist, can even inform and inspire one another. We can invent a new ideal of ingenuity, an artistry inclusive of the community and chores and activism and paid labor which are necessary elements of being a human being in this hellish landscape of late-stage capitalism.
It’s just I’m not entirely sure what that means. The man I love wants me to lie in bed with him a little longer this morning. I’m so tired. The book needs so much work.
***
Neel finally found success late in life. She began painting prominent New York City artists and writers in the 60s, which garnered her attention from elite circles. In 1974, the Whitney Museum hosted a retrospective of Neel’s work. It wasn’t until then, at the age of 74, that Neel claims she finally felt she “had a perfect right to paint.” Though her expansive oeuvre of work suggests otherwise, Neel said in an interview that she often felt, before this show, that perhaps she shouldn’t be spending all this time painting. “I had two sons and I had so many things that I should be doing, and here I was painting.”
Neel also became more robustly herself in her later years. A blue line certainly tracing her shape. In a 1978 interview, Neel says she “only flowered” after she turned 60. As a young woman, she was shy and uncertain; “everybody could knock me off base,” she said. Many of the interviews, videos, and photographs of her show an old woman—white hair, wrinkles, a cane. She is brash and funny, always cracking herself up. Her laugh is an ebullient guffaw, from the chest, and she looks around, partly, it seems, seeking encouragement or admiration; partly in knowing, feigned shock of her outrageous sentiments.
The border tracing Neel’s body, in her 1980 self-portrait an ecstatic blue, thick. How it holds her aged, drooping flesh, her inquisitive, concentrated gaze, paintbrush hovering, in-motion. Holds in. Here she was—unrelenting and enclosed by the shape of herself, tenanted by the pastel shapes, the shadows of her skin—painting.
***
How malleable your rough edges are. It is 2 AM, last summer. There is a man and there is a you, and you are walking together through your hometown, just before leaving for New York. You have been drinking; there are no cars in the streets. He says something that surprises you—it doesn’t matter what it is; you have only this night, the streetlights haloing rooftops, trees, the industrial chimney of the hospital, and the old grain silo in the middle of downtown.
At his house, you go through the familiar motions of what you think you’re supposed to do. He is sweet, relaxed, makes you come after just a few minutes. Later you’ll tell Halle that, although it was sloppy, drunken, he was leaving town the next day and you days later, it felt revelatory in a small way—that it could be so easy to be with someone, that even a one night stand didn’t have to be such a solemn charade of bodies and obscenities.
You think of him nonetheless. Months later, home again for a few weeks around the same time he’s due back to begin fall classes, you consider pushing your flight a day, two. You know you are being irrational, obsessive, but it almost seems worth it.
***
Do people come first, or does art come first? Should art come first, or people? What kind of person am I? I wanted to reject the idea of the artist as recluse, the starving artist, the artistic genius. But it seems impossible to dedicate oneself to both art and people, in equal measure. There is so little money, and even less time.
Giving to others does not inherently mean losing the self. But it is hard to make art in the presence of someone else; it is hard to make art while making dinner, while rubbing wide circles into his back. Perhaps this is why I thought Neel was a model for the woman artist—her art included people, invited them into her home, made knowing and listening and giving a necessary element in painting.
Neel’s biography is so interesting to me in part because of its relationship with her work. How her paintings depict an ethos of humanity, maternity, and care, while Neel herself performed the flawed mechanics of relationality in squeaky, jerking movements. Perhaps the care work her paintings required of her was easier to access knowing it was for the sake of her work. Mostly I think raising children is a constant laboring, an ongoingness of care which stretches beyond the canvas, beyond the moment of creation, beyond bedtime—a constancy that does not exist as a single uninterrupted line but rather as hiccups, widenings, restarting and restarting and restarting.
Moralizing about how precisely Neel obliged to her role as a mother is also not my intention. What I want to know is how to be definite and in relation. How to be an artist and a woman, both ambitious and considerate, certain and permeable. What it means to be a person who contains both “I leave myself and go into that person” and the certain, clear “I wanted to paint.”
***
To allow for a wavering—a back and forth. How eager I am in love, and yet how hesitant I am approaching it. I am so careful with whom I abandon myself for, and then I abandon myself recklessly.
I feel like an untenanted house. I feel like my own quiet room.
It’s people that matter, I repeat to myself, and of course it is. I will soon abandon the desk, the blasting heater, this confusion of unformed sentences to sit between strangers on the train across the river to where Halle’s waiting. I will see the skyscrapers in the bright gold light and a tiny dog in a purse. At a bar in the East Village, you will toast your martini glass to her negroni and experience the warmth of being a person among people with tote bags hanging on hooks under the bar top. And we are laughing and eavesdropping and trying to properly articulate yourselves so each other can really understand.
It’s just that I can never quite figure out how to have both people and myself. Or is it people and art, myself something else entirely, held and set afloat by people, held and set afloat by art? I can’t decide if I want to stay for another round, which will loosen us into a more natural ease, or travel through the varying silences of trains and sidewalks to the predictable tones of the empty apartment where I can write and be alone which is to be myself, or what I should do, or what I want, or I want to want, or I should want, or I want.
About the author
Emily Alexander is from Idaho. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Narrative Magazine, Penn Review, and Conduit. She works in restaurants and lives in Brooklyn.
About the artist
Ara Deinde is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Ibadan, Nigeria. Born in Lagos, Ara became interested in art from a young age, spending his time doodling in his school notebooks. He uses diverse mediums to reflect on themes of identity, migration, memory and fantasy.
Ara is a self taught artist. He left his degree program in Agricultural Engineering in 2019 to pursue a career in the arts. He was an artist-in-residence at KUTA Art Foundation between 2020 and 2021. The residency culminated in his first solo exhibition in 2022.
Ara's works have been exhibited in Nigeria, UK, and USA, and he has taken on several notable painting and mural commissions. He has also been featured on several publications home and abroad, including Ake Review for African Art and Literature, Up the Staircase Quarterly Review, and Insight Magazine. Ara cites Toyin Odutola Ojih, Frida Kahlo, James Grashow, Florian Baudrexel, Pablo Picasso, and Yayoi Kusama among the influences on his work.