I’ve long held that the creative process is essentially the same, no matter what art form you’re working in. I think I learned this from my mother. Mom was an artist – a painter, printmaker, and quilter – and, without knowing it at the time, I learned a lot about my own favourite art form, playwriting, by watching her paint.
Mom enjoyed modest but reasonable success. She studied with Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer, and she exhibited her work every year in the Montreal Museum of Art Spring Show. One year she had a one-woman exhibition in L.A. On another occasion the Montreal Star ran an article about her, and my teacher, Mrs. Levitsky, put the clipping up on the blackboard, making Mom, briefly, a celebrity among my classmates.
Her painting studio was in the basement of our house. She would work from found photographs or still lifes, or she’d photograph landscapes, take the photos home and create paintings based on them. I sometimes hung out in the basement while she worked, and she’d explain to me what she was doing. She never talked about emotional content, or what the paintings meant to her. She discussed technique. And years later, when I began to write plays, I found myself applying to them some principles she had taught me about painting. (Shameless plug: there’s more about this in my book, Two Ways About It, described elsewhere on this website.)
She told me of other students who would be perfecting the leaves on the tree in a corner of the painting, without sketching in the rest of the landscape; later, the entire landscape would have to be revised, and all that detail work would be lost. Her solution was to make sure that all areas of the work were at roughly the same stage of development at a given time. I learned from that to “sketch in” my plot outlines and then go over them in increasing detail, before spending too much time on particular dialogue. I was also intrigued to see her occasionally pause in her work, turn the painting upside-down and look at it in the mirror. My playwright’s version of that has been to think of my plot in terms of what might happen if the characters make choices that are opposite to the ones I’ve chosen for them.
And I learned from her – and, unintentionally, from my father – that sometimes even the people who love you the most don’t get what you’re doing. Dad was a shrewd and successful businessman, a kind and affectionate husband and father, and an excellent writer; but he did not understand my mother’s art, or art in general. He loved her, and if painting made her happy, then it was fine with him. But he was by his own description a proud philistine. He believed that Abstract Expressionism was a fraud and a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public. So I grew up in the middle of a stimulating debate.
Visits to art galleries with my parents could be an adventure. Dad was one of those guys who go around art galleries saying, “My nine-year-old son can paint better than this,” to which I would exclaim, “No I can’t!” – terrified that I might be called on to prove it. My mother would admire the paintings while my father grumbled about the price tags. Mom would say, “What are you kvetching about, you’re not paying for it,” and he would answer, “You’re damn right I’m not.”
One year an American gallery revealed that a painting of theirs by a renowned Abstract Expressionist had been, unbeknownst to them, hanging upside-down for decades. My father argued that this proved that abstract painting was a load of crap. My mother said it proved only that good work is good work, whether right-side-up, upside-down or sideways. My father said, “And even better if it’s turned around facing the wall.”
On one occasion, though, when he said, of a work by one of my mother’s favourite abstractionists, “I could paint better than that,” she said, “Prove it.” She gave him a brief lesson, stood him in front of a canvas, handed him her paints and brushes, and said, “Go ahead.”
The result was one of the ugliest paintings I’ve ever seen in my life: a sort of muddy grey-brown swirl, utterly without charm or meaning. One of my father’s beefs with abstract art was their non-committal titles: “Composition 14,” that sort of thing. (He said it would help if the title at least gave you some hint of what the painting was “supposed to be.” My mother would say, “It’s supposed to be a painting!”) So in tribute to these unhelpful titles, my father proudly called his own masterpiece “Vortex Number One.” I said, “‘Number One’? Does that mean there’s gonna be more of these?” “Not with my brushes,” said Mom.
This argument always took place in a spirit of good humour, but there may be a sad side to this story. My mother never tried abstraction. It wasn’t until after they’d both died that I realized that this might have been because the argument with my father was difficult enough when it was about other artists’ work: she didn’t want to bring it home and make it personal.
But towards the end of her life, she took up quilting. She was a skillful seamstress, but quilting struck me as old-fashioned and a little foreign to our urban, Jewish, middle-class, 20th-century world. However, she loved it, and wished she had discovered this medium earlier. Again, it wasn’t until a few years ago that it occurred to me that this might have been her way of exploring abstraction without exacerbating the argument with my dad. An abstract painting was avant-garde and kooky, but an abstract quilt was just a traditional quilt.
One more lesson was in the fact that we never know how our work will affect people, or what it will mean. Around 1974, I went to see a theatre piece, went backstage afterwards, met the one member of the company I didn’t already know – an actress named Lin Bennett – and came home with a copy of the show’s “poster”: actually a postcard, with a picture of the five cast members.
Then my friend Anne Levitsky (mentioned above as my Grade Five teacher, and my friend to this day) visited our Vancouver home as part of a cross-country trip from Montreal, took some pictures of me and my daughter, and went home and showed her photographs to my parents. Later, during a phone call, my mother asked about the postcard, visible on the wall in one of the photos. I peeled it off the wall, put it in an envelope and mailed it to her, and she copied the image of those five actors as part of a print, which she called “The Old Bunch”.
By the time that actress and I got married, some 28 years later, Mom had died, and she and Lin never met. But that print by my mother, featuring the image of my wife, hung proudly in our home for years, next to the original postcard, now in its own frame.
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