As I obsessively sketched everything around me, I thought a lot about the artistic streak in my mother’s side of the family. In her youth, my Mum had sung, acted, and played the piano. Her father loved photography and even dabbled in oil painting in his later years. Art and music seemed to be part of their family vocabulary.
At this phase in my own life, I’d begun to feel like creative expression was a part of my heritage, and that maybe it might light a path that I could follow to find my own future. In some way or other, I wondered if art was going to save me or at least enable me to save myself. I had also started to wonder if I could find a way to connect with my mother through art.
My mother Angela was in long-term care in Riverview after years of alcoholism and manic-depression. She’d suffered brain damage after a near-fatal alcohol overdose, and after a few years of a regime of meds (and rumored ECT treatments), she was hard to communicate with and didn’t seem to recognize her family anymore. That reality was hard to take, but I kept telling myself that she was still in there somewhere and that she needed me to visit her. I worried that by this time, with our family not going out to visit her weekly or monthly, I might be the only visitor she got anymore. Really, I was afraid of losing what little connection I held with her. Kind of a “use it or lose it” feeling.
In my visits with Mum up at Riverview Hospital, she almost rarely spoke, except in monosyllables. I really wanted to see if she could draw with a pencil, and what her mind and hand might reveal to me about who she was, and how she was doing. I was aware that I was learning a new visual language through drawing and sketching, and I wanted to see if we could communicate in a different way.
On my visits, I would show her my sketches, and would ask her if she would draw for me too. Her hands and arms often tremored noticeably, likely from her meds, but I’ll never really know for sure. Some of her drawing attempts are little more than a few lines and patches of scribbles. But sometimes when she put the pencil to the paper, her shaking would stop completely and she’d trace out a beautiful profile of a face. There was still someone or something at work inside of her – something that would awaken and scribe out an old memory or an old idea.
Getting her to draw was my way of seeing if she could respond, and what she might be able to express by drawing. I also used our visits as my own drawing practice, trying to capture her face and presence.
Sometimes, it was like generating new familiarity to fill the emotional and physical space that separated us as mother and son. If I could capture her image with my own hand, it would feel like I had earned a piece of her to keep for myself.
