Stepping into Someone Else's Shoes

This week is the opening reception for my exhibition at Sholom West.  Sholom is an elder residential facility with a Jewish focus located in the Twin Cities.  Sholom residents were the focus of a three year interview and artwork project that I recently completed.  It began with interviews of elders and often their families and concluded with a series of artwork based on their stories.  I conceived of this idea on impulse and remember my early grant proposals which outlined what even then sounded like a rather immense project.  It wasn't until I narrowed the project to stages that I began to receive grants to support the project.  No doubt some had thought "my eyes were bigger than my stomach".  In fact the project was more complex than I fully realized. Seventeen interviews, transcriptions, edited videos and paintings, twenty-three blog posts and eighteen speeches later I am now talking about this project from the high ground of completion.  Phew!

This past week I did a talk about the project for a senior group at the local JCC.  In the group were two women, Shirley and Hanna, whom I had interviewed.  I rather anxiously hoped they would like my treatment of their stories.  I ran into Shirley when my husband and I arrived at Sholom to hang the show. ( Did I mention that my wonderful husband builds my frames and "helps" me to hang my shows?)  I showed Shirley the paintings I had done based on her stories and she was tickled at the outcome of our long ago interview.  In my talk I played a little bit of video of her telling of her grandmother keeping chickens by the bed prior to them becoming dinner.

Hanna's story was Everything Stopped, about the sudden cessation of Red Cross letters from her parents in Germany while she, part of the Kindertransport, was living in London during WWII.  I had imagined and painted what it was to wait, not knowing what had happened even as one considered various possibilities, hoping against hope that they were all right. In fact they were not and met their fate in Auschwitz.  The painting was semi-abstract as I imagined a black hole of silence and I wasn't sure how well a more abstract painting might work for her.  I was gratified when Hanna told me it captured her feelings exactly.

There is something about the process of  painting a story that forces you to imagine someone else's experience.  A study came out recently that found when people read literary fiction it caused them to be more empathetic.  They attributed that to the fact that they encountered unexpected situations where they had to infer what someone else felt.  I think painting someone else's story is much the same.  When I painted Hanna's story, I knew the bones of it.  Letters from her family suddenly stopped. I thought about her phrasing, "everything stopped" and how you only know that after waiting.  The awareness of cessation only comes after time passes. Then I imagined waiting with a sense of foreboding. It was from that place that I began my painting.

For the recent Artists' Lab show, I had tried my hand at poetry to complement my painting.  I realized how that too is a means of stepping into someone else's shoes.  The thought occurred to me that each of my paintings comes out of a place similar to that of poetry.  I am often free associating, combining disparate imagery.  That is especially true of the more abstracted imagery.  With that in mind I began to write poetry about my paintings in this series. Here is the one I wrote of Hanna's story.

Suddenly Everything Stopped

Waiting for word,
So homesick my stomach clenches.
I can no longer remember when it didn't.
What is this fear I can not swallow?
When letters come
Cryptic words are carefully chosen
for other eyes watching, always watching.
Vati, Muti
Signed with the pen that their hands held.
My fingers trace the letters as if I could touch them,
Grab their fingers and hold them tight.
I want to tell them
how I struggle
with the shape of English words.
The, this, that,
my tongue below my front teeth
trying to make the sound of thistles and thimbles and thieves.
Thieves threw our piano out the window
Threatened our family
And thinned our belongings.
I polish the stones of the fireplace,
Of the Quaker family
that took me in.
The stones shine with my fear.

My mother gathered my belongings
And put me on the train.
There were other children too,
I was sixteen,
No longer a child
But not yet ready to leave my home.
Only I had to go,
my brother stayed behind.
Now I take care of English children
and an English home
And miss my family,
And miss my family
With a throbbing ache
I didn't know possible.
The Red Cross sends their letters,
Not much, but something.
But now, nothing,
Nothing for months.
Suddenly everything stopped.
Anxiously I await word,
Word that does not come,
A silent void, a black hole of silence
Fills my head
And fear so thick it chokes me.
Something has happened.

In the poem I wove in other elements of Hanna's story.  She had talked of how her mother packed her belongings and put her on the train to a boat to England, the Kindertransport.  She also told me of how Nazis had thrown their piano out the window and of her struggle to learn English. A little research told me that one of the harder things for a German speaker to learn in English is the "th" sound so I played with that a bit in this poem. And she talked of how the British liked the stones of their fireplaces polished and I imagined her polishing them with fear propelling her fingers.

Hanna told me that she expected me to be older to be able to capture her sentiments as I did, as if life's losses bestow a greater sense of empathy.  I think perhaps painting or writing can also be doorways to such understanding.

Getting Started on Everything Stopped

These past few months I’ve been immersed in everything except painting. My time has been consumed with video editing for my interview series, public speaking about my artwork and a smattering of family history consulting. I finally decided it was time to venture back into the studio and begin a painting on my more recent interviews. I’d forgotten about the feeling of anticipation tinged with a little anxiety that I experience when I begin a painting.

I often have people ask me how long it takes me to do a painting. There is no simple answer to that question. Paintings begin long before brush meets canvas. Even then they are started, painted over and begun anew. So I thought I would track the process in this blog and give you a flavor for at least how one painting develops.

Artists begin paintings in very different ways. Some do careful sketches and plan out the composition. Others like my husband start putting paint down until they have an abstract from which they then develop the imagery that they see within that abstract. The first is a careful planner, the second draws more on subconscious. I am at neither end of the spectrum. I begin with an idea so in that sense I have some view of where I am going. I have a story to tell. The question is how I am going to tell it. Sometimes it is representational, sometimes it has elements of free association and veers towards semi-abstract.

My current painting began in yoga class as I lay in child’s pose. My overactive brain never quite rests, but as I slowed my body down I began to think about my interviews and the imagery they conjured. I’ve written about my more recent interviews in these pages and the act of writing and editing them has forced me to find the kernels, the details that best define the story. As I thought about Hanna and her story of coming over on the Kindertransport, I thought of her Red Cross letters. These letters had been her only way of communicating with her family still in Germany. They were transmitted through the Red Cross, but she told me that one couldn’t say much because other eyes were watching. Hanna showed little affect as she talked about her family and the war. She carefully managed her emotions. Her story was best told in what wasn’t said. In answer to the question of how she knew her parents were no longer alive she replied, “everything stopped.” Her parents had been very good about sending Red Cross letters to her, fondly signed Vati and Mutti, until they could no longer send them. Her father, mother and brother all died in Auschwitz and Hanna had to carry on. And carry on she did with strong survival instincts noted by her daughters.

The letters represented a different life and the embrace of family. When they stopped, that life ended and another began. I knew that the name of the painting would be “ Everything Stopped”. So the challenge with a painting about stopping is where to start. I’ve learned it doesn’t much matter as I can paint it out if I don’t like it. The important thing is to start and get things flowing. Then the process will take over. I have also learned that I am an experiential person. I have to do and see things to evaluate them. Some people can picture a dress out of a bolt of cloth. I would need to make it and then remake it if necessary. That is the way I paint as well.

I reviewed the imagery that I had from Hanna. She had many photos of her prior life and all of her Red Cross letters in an album. I had taken pictures of some of them as her granddaughter leafed through them. I had a picture of Hanna’s hands as well. I decided to begin with the Red Cross letters and did a rather abstracted painting of the pages, one folded open and emphasizing the many colors embedded in a seemingly white page. Blues, purples, yellows all tinted the page. The painting looked quite abstract until I inserted the red cross at the top with some identifying print.

So what next? I looked at the picture of Hanna’s hands, very square, purposeful hands. I imagined the many times they had touched those pages longing for her family. Touching the handwritten “Vati, Mutti” thinking of when her parents last touched that same page. With that thought I began to sketch in the hands. After four hours of painting I had a fairly representational painting with hands that still required some work to be captured fully. I took a picture and decided to come back and view it with fresh eyes. I track the progress of my paintings through photographs to remind myself how much they develop and change. Were it not for photographs I could easily forget the stages through which they pass.

When I leave my studio I frequently set up the painting I am working on so it faces the door. This is so I can see it as someone stumbling across a painting in a studio and test my reaction. The next time I entered my studio I was less taken with the hands, too representational. I had just been reading Levin’s book on Lee Krasner, an abstract expressionist, which no doubt influenced my reaction. Before I could second guess myself I painted out the hands.

OK, hands off, now what? I played with the writing, recording it, then covering it with a glaze of medium and white. Scratching into it, then scraping away with a palette knife. I pictured a void of silence. Nothing coming, a black hole and began to paint it in the corner of the canvas. As I painted that black hole it reminded me of an ear, the dark center of it, listening anxiously for word that doesn't come.
It occurred to me that there must have been a long period of waiting, listening, before the finality of "everything stopped" was acknowledged. It would have been a gradual, horrifying realization. By thinking of Hanna's experience at that time, the concept of the painting began to take form. It was to be of that moment before full comprehension of loss, when one anxiously awaits the word which doesn't come.

The form around the hole began to take the shape of an ear, not necessarily recognizable as such because blues and purples seemed like the right colors to balance the painting. And blue is the color of sadness, loss, so perhaps it is fitting in an emotional sense. Above it the scratched in words, Mutti, Vati, Halo, their pet name for her. Because these paintings are to tell a story, I don’t want to let them get so abstract that the story is lost. But it is possible for some elements to be abstracted as long as the story works with them. By now I had spent six hours actually painting.

The painting was beginning to take shape, but it didn't look quite finished to me. I reread the interview with Hanna and was struck by her statement about being careful what they wrote because other eyes were watching. I added eyes above and began to sculpt the ear below. Soon I had the image above.

So how much time has passed? By now I've invested eight hours of painting, but painting isn't the only time involved. Remember I create my own source material so before I could paint, I had to do the interview, transcribe it, video edit and write a blog entry to pull out the key elements. All of that is part of the process by which I internalize the story. So add on another 26 hours before I can even pick up a paint brush. I'm not sure if I am done yet, but to get to this stage it has taken 34 hours of work. Each painting is unique and the time it requires varies, but the various stages and evolution are fairly representative of the process. You can see how much a painting evolves in just a few days. When I live with it for awhile it often invites editing and further changes.

And Then Everything Stopped

“I never bothered the children with the Holocaust and all that. I never told them anything,” said Hanna. 

For our interview we sat with her two daughters and two granddaughters as she told us about her escape from Germany on the Kindertransport. Her parents and brother stayed behind and perished in Auschwitz.

Hanna had a comfortable life in a wealthy family in Germany. Her father was in the grain business and the family lived in a large home with a cook and housekeeper. She talked of their vacations at the Baltic Sea and skiing in Switzerland. In our conversation she frequently came back to the wonderful life she had with her family, a life documented in photos sent by her parents and lovingly preserved by Hanna. That life began to change as the Nazis came to power.

Hanna’s children had in fact heard some stories from her that were quite vivid. They remembered her talking of the family buying her father out of a concentration camp. He went in with black hair and came out with gray hair. She had also talked about the Nazis pushing their piano out the window. Thrown out of their home they had gone to stay with a friend of her father’s so were not at home when it occurred. They lived with the friend for a year. As the climate worsened Hanna was sent to a Jewish boarding school, one she described as “for kids who don’t have parents or can’t go home anymore.” She recalled the beautiful country in which it was located, but that they closed the whole thing down at the time she left. “No Jews, so that was the end of that,” she said.

“When I was sixteen I immigrated to England. I was all on my own already. My mother packed my suitcase and whatever she wanted me to take to America later on. I went to England with the children’s transport. I went to a very nice family who needed help for their kids and taking care of the house. A Quaker family. I went to church with them on Sunday. A different life.”

It was a difficult adjustment for Hanna who mourned for the life she left. “I was very lonesome. The only person having to go from my house. Lots of other kids went too, and different ages. For me it was awful.”

Hanna also faced the language difficulties of every immigrant. While she spoke French and German, she spoke no English.

“I learned English with my dictionary. I had a German-English dictionary. I still have it. I had that with me all the time. The lady was very nice, that couple was very nice and the child, so they taught me. You learn. When you’re young, you learn easier than when you’re older.”

Suddenly she was thrust from a world where she had everything to one where she was responsible for caring for a house, a responsibility of the housekeeper in her childhood home.

 “It’s not easy living in somebody else’s house either, being the second dog….the English people are very fussy. The bricks in front of the fireplaces, they have polished bricks and they had to be polished every day.”

She eagerly awaited any word from her family which came in the form of Red Cross letters, letters sent by the Red Cross on their behalf. “You didn’t write much because you knew somebody else was in between.”

Hanna pulled out her photo albums in which she kept her Red Cross letters. She told us that her parents were very good about writing, “and then everything stopped.”

Her granddaughter asked in puzzlement, “ Did you get any news? Did you get any notice that your parents had died, your brother?

Hanna replied, “ No, I never did. The only thing, I found out because I didn’t get any more Red Cross letters.”

After three years in England she decided to become a nurse. She had a choice of nursing or working in a munitions factory, so she chose nursing. She cared for soldiers in an Army hospital in England during the war and later was able to come to the United States where she finished her training.
Her mother had a brother who had gone to South Africa. He later joined his girlfriend in Minneapolis. They took Hanna in and recreated the family she once had.

 “The couple was the best thing for me,” Hanna said. “ They took over my parents. They made everything for me. I stayed in their house for the first six months when I was here.”

When I asked her daughters what they had learned from their mother, they replied, “Survival skills. She’s a tough lady. You don’t want to be a whiner around her. She taught us to be tough. She doesn’t show her emotions really. Only, when talking about the Holocaust we don’t see any emotion from her, but in other areas the emotion comes out. She cries at weddings or somebody winning something on a game show but when it comes down to the real thing that is beneath what the tears are all about you’ll never see the tears.”

This project has been made possible in part through the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008. Administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.

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