In the past month, I have been selling and giving away paintings. They are not the work of a famous artist or even my own output. No, they are the 400-painting oeuvre of my 90-year-old mother. A literature scholar by profession, she retired long ago from teaching and had painted nearly every day for 30 years due to a fiendish work ethic. But four months ago, she was diagnosed with cancer. I have been helping her with her chemotherapy appointments, among other only-child caretaker duties.
For me, there has been a parallel quest, though: to sell or give away some of her oil paintings, many of which are still stored in her apartment. Finding homes for the paintings while she is still with me has taken on a strange urgency — I want her to know where they will dwell. I ask the new owner of each painting to send me a photograph to show her where it hangs. Yet there is more to it than that.
As a result of cataloging and handling her work, I understand better what it is that she was doing, painting away, often alone, with only a few people — her fellow amateur artist retiree friends and the like — ever seeing most of what she made. Paintings can be seen as commemorating time or capturing individual subjectivity. While decades of art criticism have put these truisms in question, for my mother painting did give shape to her way of seeing.
Why hadn’t I paid more attention to her paintings before? Looking anew, I found out things about her that I had never bothered to think about — children, of course, don’t tend to dwell on their parents’ ambitions or reveries. My guess is that painting made her feel free, outside of time, age, self-criticism, self-doubt and even social class. My mother painted when she was young, and her abstract oils hung in our living room. I didn’t think about them very much when I was a kid, although their very ’60s color schemes might explain why my favorite color is orange.
Then she took a long break, a career to attend to, a child to raise, teaching, with its small pleasures mixed with blue-book-grading drudgery. But after her early retirement from the City University of New York system — the buyouts of the 1990s — she suddenly had time for art classes. She describes it as “a whole second life.” Some days, she’d paint all day long, sometimes just in the mornings. She painted in the Berkshires with painting friends and in a studio in an old-time artists’ building in Union Square, a relic of an art scene in Manhattan that barely exists. All of this — being able to retire early, obtaining a reasonably priced studio to paint in (with excellent light, praise be), even an accessibly priced summer home — was, admittedly, part of an entire system of affordability that has basically vanished from many of our major cities. My mother was generationally lucky in this way.
Over the years, my mom was in group exhibitions but never sought out a gallery show. To this day, she has a mixture of self-effacement and pride about her work. Her paintings may not be “worth” a gallery show, in her mind, but they certainly shouldn’t be cast out on the streets.
She had long worried about her paintings being carelessly disposed of. She told me about an artist friend who had developed a number of age-related afflictions, and then his caregivers “recycled” his work by giving his canvases away to an art school, where they could be painted over. It was when my mother asked for a painting of his and learned there weren’t any on hand that she realized what had transpired.
My mom didn’t have to make me swear that I would never do such a thing. One reason, in fact, that I am art-homing so energetically is so that my mother will know that I am not discarding her work. Placing her paintings has been, as they say, healing, as I disseminate them to their owners. I imagine her relationship to nature, even some version of her mind, is now scattered across many homes.
Hundreds of thousands of artists in this country whom no one has ever heard of have their art, like my mother’s friend’s, simply gotten rid of when they age or die. They are never “discovered” in their lifetimes. At best, they have a thrift-store-painting afterlife. According to one study, only 20 percent of artists will exhibit their work in their lifetime. The chances of such cultural affirmation are even less likely for women: A 2019 study found that between 2008 and 2018, only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14 percent of exhibitions at 26 major U.S. museums were of works by female artists.
My mom did it not for renown or to have her work seen and judged but rather to feel nature in her body, she says, and to also get closer to the painters she admired.
I think her ambition was Romantic in the true sense — poets of that early-19th-century tradition saw the apex of art as the artist being at one with beauty and nature. (In contrast, I have always wanted to be at one with society.)
Earlier in my mother’s illness, I persuaded a friend to do a little show at her venue, though ultimately my mother nixed what she considered a mercy exhibition, despite my reassurances that quite a few supposedly deserved gallery shows are a result of impure motives.
Instead, I went for the collective joy of dispersing her paintings. I felt it when I sold these paintings in the garden of my building in Brooklyn, arrayed on folding chairs as if they were human conversationalists. Her glowing canvases of hills and lakes briefly brought a micro-community together, one that I knew I had but that had rarely coalesced, as the color and light of simple landscape paintings and a portrait offered a brief respite. Little kids and dogs raced one another in the June heat. Encircled by her paintings, residents whom I had never met before shared their stories. Why don’t we do things like this more often, we wondered, as we often do at occasions like this, and then we went on, back into the slipstream.
One of my mother’s paintings now hangs in my friend’s Upper West Side office; another is owned by the guy in Massachusetts who hauled away her ancient broken air-conditioners, and a fourth by a local cleaning woman. Another I sold to a couple who said they had no art in their home. My friends who are professional artists are the most keen: One photographer I am close to has three, two on her mantel. There are paintings of a pond with lily pads, cows, a cosmic night sky and a downright goth portrait.
Today, as I wrap the 35th painting of my mother’s I have distributed so far — in leftover plastic from the dry cleaner — I feel some relief. A painting is the promise that our consciousness can persist beyond the hand that picked up the brush. For three decades, this is how my mother measured out her days. Her paintings are on my living room wall, in the hallway, in a large plastic box in my basement and in a unit at Manhattan Mini Storage. Her art is now also in the dwellings of my friends and of strangers, ensuring that wherever I go, a piece of my mother is likely to be with me.
Alissa Quart (@alissaquart) is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of seven books, most recently “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream.”
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