The first paintings came from a place before thought and intent. An automatic response to the non-time of being a new mom. The paintings felt like fire, like an indulgence I was crouching towards. As soon as my baby was nestled into my chest in the carrier, or in his own little bed, I would lick my lips and get the supplies together, humming with my mouth, humming all over.
In art school my best work came a few days into a creative bender. Under fluorescent lights and a mess of half started paintings I would find new ways into myself, animal and brave. I found myself a few weeks into motherhood easily able to summon this maker-spirit who eluded me during my twenties, when I was busy asking how my art fit into the puzzle of other art. But when my son’s birthday became a scar on my stomach the creator-maven returned. Even during pregnancy, my swollen self seemed to hum with poems, the potential of creating universes unleashed. There are two emotions which floated easiest to the surface in those early days. They fuel the paintings and these words. They sustain me and undo me in quick succession, multiple times a day. There is love and there is anger.
Love is being in a room on a Friday that has six people in it, and then a moment later, seven, because one of them was just removed from your belly and began. Love is the boy on my chest looking up at me for the first time in that searching but found way, an eye in a hurricane. His little red handprints blooming against me, his sloppy kisses, his proud dance performances, his words and sentences that are not yet words but just joyous sounds stumbling their way towards meaning.
And then there is the anger. I spend a good amount of my creative energies trying to express just how hard it is to parent, in what specific ways. I try to map it out to help my husband understand it, to help myself see it. My paintings are red, the type of red I imagine my insides to be, the parts that fabricate life, the kind I first saw as a girl of eleven in my underwear, the carnage of decades of menstruation, muted for nine months and concluding in an explosion of souls.
The marks I make are part word, and part glyph, they are also wanting to be numbers, to help me count. To see the time pass, to catch it as it's passing and put it on the paper. To capture the forty-first day of motherhood. To capture the two hundred and eleventh, each one unique and its own, each one there and then gone forever, the red painted lines are just skeletons of all the love and anger moving through me every day.
The anger comes from being invisible. With my son I work all day making milk for him and feeding it to him. I am bending over and arching my back, twisting my wrists and ankles and neck in impossible contortions, reaching for things, holding him, catching him, chasing him. I am wiping things up, I am getting lost looking for lost things on the floor, I am tired beyond coffee, beyond sleep.
The blank page emerged as a way forward. In the past, the page was a precipice I didn't feel worthy of filling up with myself. Now the blank page was food. Or I was food. It was waiting to be swallowed up, and the red paint on the tip of the brush was the tongue and both the paper and me are tasting each other. I drag the tip against the page and a line appears each minute. I see red and I paint that, through a swirl of words I wanted to write down but didn't have time because my mind was never free.
In new parenthood life becomes five minute stretches. Five minutes to eat, to shower, to poop, call someone, check email, walk the dog. Can you imagine the delight of using a whole five minutes to cover a blank page with red marks? I started to play with the marks, what if each x red mark represented five minutes I spent nursing, and a circle for soothing him as he cried,a triangle for changing a diaper? And so his actions drove the symbols of my paintings, sculpted their composition from just love and anger into lines and time that turned the chaos of my days into order, into a chart with a key and a legend until the moment someone asked me when I was going back to work or if I was bored at home with him and I could furnish the evidence at least to myself, at the very least a dutiful scribe of the most mundane tasks which are occurring in a million variations of care all over the world at any given moment.
I am proud and full of accomplishment and my eyes may sometimes well up with tears at the sight of a blank page going away when it’s just me and paper ravenous for each other. It feels selfish and the laundry is not going to do itself but I hear Shirley Jackson in my ear saying close the door, let the house fall apart, keep your mind free, you have created this universe and it is yours, yours to let fall into disarray, yours to lose control of. Shirly Jackson wrote "The Lottery" she wrote many books and stories and she had many children and a house. She died in the sixties when my parents were just kids in Warsaw who didn't know each other yet, and yet the little egg that would become me was already there in my mom and my dad was already probably charming little girls into trees to kiss but it would be another twenty years before I could be born and another thirty before I would become a mother and would learn that Shirley Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont where I went to college and I would feel proud to have shared the world with her even if it was only half of me at the time, and that we shared a forest and a few streets and a college because of all the heroes I had ever read about, none ever made me feel as inspired and as alive as Shirley Jackson, the writer and defiant housewife.
Patti Maciesz
(pronounced MAH-chesh) is a Polish-American artist and writer living on stolen Ohlone land in Oakland, California. Her multidisciplinary approach to making care work visible and valued spans art, writing, activism and performance.
Maciesz received her BA from Bennington College in 2007, was a 2018 Grant recipient of the Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund and a 2019 Family Resident of the Wassaic Project. Her work has appeared in groups shows at Nous Tous Gallery in Los Angeles, the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, and presented as part of the 2018 Utopia Conference in London. She’s been featured in local, national and international press, radio and tv and was the subject of a documentary series by Tiny Oak Media.
Maciesz is the creator of billthepatriarcy.com and invisiblelaborunion.com and select work is viewable at artpatti.com