‍1. An Autobiography of drawing drawing

“...The clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on [her] subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. The rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide…” What happens when this space, a space of clarity of thought, an expressive space, which Vivian Gornick describes as a shimmering rectangle, opens so wide it pours forth into being in the world? This is a personal process of thinking and coming into being, rather than a purely conceptual one. Porousness: there is risk, there is gut, and vulnerability. Boxes of pleasure. And pain.

2. Light

A mother’s liberation: a shimmering rectangle of light and color. Painting classes. Doing. The child watches. Knows. Her father leaves. A mother will never paint again. Draw a limit // Paint a line. To draw a map of a life. Frame.

3. Music

The child under a piano. Her father playing Bach. Pleasure of the afternoon. Weekend shopping for classical music records. Father choosing passionately. Child in sofa, waiting. Musty smells of sala Margolín, now OMR: a space within a space, a box of memory contained inside a box. Pleasure and leisure. Words hidden inside words, feelings inside feelings. Time passes, rhythm stays. Moving.

4. Snake

Death comes knocking. Never expected. A child is a woman whose mind cannot protect her from feeling. Death draws near.  Death of a parent would leave a child orphaned even when she in turn is already a mother. And so the woman who was once a child who is a mother now comes back to the first thing a child does, even before speaking: drawing. Rectangles open and close. Shimmer and dull. Remember there is pain behind this paint: archeological Rorschach. Layers upon layers of meaning. Boxes inside boxes.

5. Duel/Wake

Feelings fight. Paper reflects back. Mourning after. To express this pain through this paint opens up a common space. We share sediment, residue, rectangles ablaze. Wash. Take (f)light.

6. Hang

 “The grey bark of the freshly dead is loose and cracked open; pale lacy whorls of fern cling in clumps, like tangled baby’s hair. Sensitive and perseverant, they cling to and comfort death. Beneath the fern, the bark is mottled with light green mold, feeding lovingly. My thoughts dissolve in the grey and green, traveling from life to death to life.” To cling, to fasten, to persevere. How life is drawn forth from death. Feeding lovingly, writes Mary Gaitskill. To comfort. A child who is a woman, was once a baby, sick, inside an incubator. Isolated. The father left a note near her tiny feet: Hang in there. The line between life and death always tenuous, a crossing. Time passes but how we laugh, how we cry is its color. Now draw in. Hang on. And then let go.

Gabriela Jauregui

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