I am an artist. I thought I was a writer. I’d written a book called Bodies Unbound that was published in 1996 and I teach writing. But one day, visiting a friend in North Carolina, I picked up a sharpie pen and drew her overstuffed chair. I drew the windows behind it that offered a view of winter, leafless trees My friend gave me a set of watercolors to color the drawing. The white lamp became purple with beads, and the walls were transformed by yellow flowered wallpaper. The conservative decor of my friend’s room became a bright, whimsical place in my painting. Her dark green chair became red. Her tan carpet – orange. I stared at what I had done. It seemed to stare back at me smiling.
The next night I painted my friend’s sofa. I don’t draw well, so instead of sitting on the ground like a good sofa, it seemed to be lifting off the floor ready to take flight. I drew a mobile hanging from the ceiling. Then I drew a bookcase and wrote the name of every subject on the spine. Neither the bookcase or the mobile were there in reality but they were in other parts of the house.
What I was most pleased about was not the final result of the painting but the way doing it made me feel. I was focused, happy, almost in a state of bliss. What had happened? I was experiencing true, fulfilling pleasure, a rare and wondrous experience for me. It seemed that my writing, which had expressed my deepest, darkest, experiences had cleaned out a place where child-like joy could express. The color red dissolved every disappointment and worry. Nothing could diminish fear like blue. Nothing could dispel jealousy like painting a black and white cat contentedly lying on my chair. I wasn’t even hungry!
The harmony and sweetness of my paintings nourished me in a way nothing else had. I was like a warrior who had finally surrendered. “Here I am,” the painting said, “home at last.”
That year I painted over 40 paintings. They began with what I saw, but them some whimsical idea would come along and I couldn’t help trying it out. For instance I drew my bed but then put it floating on a Lotus pond. Beside it was my Tibetan Terrier, Marco Polo, floating in the pond on his sleeping rug. Since I still couldn’t draw with any accuracy it was like nothing you’d ever seen but you knew what it was. I have called this series Home At Last.