Framed: Practicing Art, Creativity, and Love in My Home

I grew up in the art galleries of Washington, DC, taken there by my art student mother. We saw most major exhibitions that came to the Smithsonian in the seventies, as well as many that opened at the Corcoran, and I accompanied her to some galleries on Seventh Street, which was then a rundown collection of studios in buildings that had once been the shopping district of the city. We saw a few poetry readings there too, something that nurtured my own growing love of language and a desire to own it with my own poems.

It should have been no surprise to my parents that when the famed East Wing opened my high school boyfriend and I would often skip school to catch the subway to it. We were at a school for gifted math and science students, and our gifts could not be contained by those four walls—we had each other and were full of ideas. One of those was always to see what was at the East Wing. Our other practiced art was each other, a discipline in which we became experts that summer of 1979.

Now my house is full of art: Every wall is covered with art, some with paintings stacked like the Louvre–but those would be walls with my art, naïve paintings that I began to make the year my 94 year old grandmother died and I found my writing voice silenced for the first time in my life. I found that color was the only voice I had, and so I began to draw. At first, I drew cartoonish figures of memories: In my grief, I compiled images of all the things she and I had done together, or that my other grandmother and I had done together. I compiled these little drawings in a collection that I called, What Are Mothers For? but more aptly could have been called, Why I Needed You.

From there I became hooked on paints: watercolors, acrylics, alcohol inks, gouache. My supplies began to appear in rooms throughout the house: my office, the dining room, the living room. Spare surfaces became easels. The closets filled with random art supplies which grew to include beads, wires, tiles and more. The more I made and the more art stores I visited, the more I seemed to need. Watercolor paper, multimedia paper, sketch paper, drawing paper, paper of all sizes. Frames, glass, mats….there is no end to the supplies an artist—no matter how amateur—can amass.

And all of that work needs a place to be. It was not enough for me to fill volumes of sketchbooks and pages of journals with the things I was making. Some pieces that I made were so precious to me that I had to frame them. They represented something new I had created, or some bit of a moment I wanted to record. They marked something I had achieved, or thought I had achieved, in my development as an artist. Never mind that I had not taken a class or read a book…I simply watched other artists, joined an artists guild where friendly artists encouraged my nascent attempts, and I was gone.

When I painted a sunflower that approximated the look of a sunflower? I framed it. A watercolor of my son that almost looked like a boy diving into the river? Framed. A triptych of bright colors that had an impressionistic bent? Framed. Soon, the entire entryway to my house was full of my mother’s art—her beautifully rendered work, the work of a master—and mine, done between the ages of 53 and 58, as if a kindergartener had been set loose with a budget  to frame anything that caught her eye.

On the other hand, the bright works surround me with what I love: color, design, and art, things I have been seen all my life as the daughter of an artist. My walls feature art that my mother, Mary Hourihan Lynch, has created over various points in her long career, starting with a trip she took to Normandy my junior year of high school and she had just graduated from college. She brought back canvases rolled in tubes from where she had painted them in fields along the French coast, a plein air experience that cured her, she says, of ever wanting to paint outdoors again. My painting hangs above my bed, a beautiful impressionistic garden outside a cottage—it is near dark and the flowers emerge in a gorgeous tangle of color and abandon against the white of the cottage. The painting is small, not more than 18 x 24 inches. I have carried it with me from a college dorm in 1980 to my first apartment to the house where I have lived now for 24 years.

Another favorite is a large abstract canvas in gradations of purple and blue with an object about two-thirds along the horizon that might be a sailboat. The painting is actually something she made while painting something else—this was simply a way of cleaning off a palette-full of colors she had mixed and liked.

While these canvases and a few others hang flat like traditional canvasses, most others hang out from the wall, the three-dimensional sculpted or shaped canvases my mother has spent her career inventing and perfecting. On the inside these look the interior of early airplanes, delicate pieces of wood carefully supporting frames of canvas. But this is deceptive because the pieces are strong and sturdy and, once hung, appear to be as strong as any other well-built canvas.

Of these, my favorite is one called Kimono. It is about 4.5 feet tall and, at its farthest points, as wide. It is two pieces that swoop across each other with a belt of sweeping golds and silvers, one with an undulating pattern of wood. The primary colors are shades of purple with muted metallics fanning across, and, behind them, more pieces that fan out in different shades of copper and metal. It is narrow at what might be the waist, but has a gesture of movement, as if a woman is walking away. I have always loved this piece—as much for its movement and architectural finesse as for the fact that purple is my favorite color.

Several years ago I found myself in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, interviewing a just-widowed woman whose husband had been a prominent local figure. I was writing about best practices in end-of-life care and, thanks to that city’s excellent record on advance care planning, her husband had experienced a relatively peaceful end of life. Even so, it was daunting to find myself alone with a newly bereaved woman, asking her probing questions about the final days of her husband’s life and how it had been for her.

Somehow, the story came up of what she had buried him in. Their son had served in Vietnam and on some part of his journey home from that war, he had stopped in Japan and purchased a kimono for his father. The woman laughed. “A kimono! What would his father ever do with a kimono? Where would he wear such a thing?” Apparently, they had kept it wrapped up for thirty or forty years, until the widow had come across it as she tried to decide what to bury her husband in. c

“That kimono seemed just right, it just seemed like the right thing to lay him to rest in,” she said. “People sure were surprised, but there he was, as handsome as could be in his kimono.”

She went on to tell me that she had met her husband when she was a government girl in Washington, DC, during World War II. He was working in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, making torpedoes that would be sent down the Potomac to be loaded on to boats and off to war. I gasped when she said this.

“Yes, he even made me a tiny torpedo charm necklace,” she said. “ I wore that everywhere I went for years.”

I happened to have my mother’s business card with me. She has had a studio at the Torpedo Factory for decades, and for many years the image on her card was of the kimono. I took the card from my wallet and explained to the widow that the Factory had long since been converted to artists’ studios where the public could watch artists at work. More than a hundred artists have studios there, I told her, including my mom.

“This is one of her pieces, it’s called ‘Kimono,’” I said.

She looked at it and smiled. “The world is surely full of strange coincidences,” she said, or something to that effect.

I replied,  “I guess God wanted us to meet each other today,” I said. “Something sent me to you.”

She told me more about what it was like to be a young woman in World War II, dancing with a boy who made torpedo necklaces. They were married for more than 50 years. Who’s to say what any of this means. When I got home I finished my assignment, writing about the widow and what it took to fashion a good end of life based on her husband’s wishes. I did not describe his kimono, or my exchange with his widow.

As I write it is the end of Veterans Day 2020. I am looking at the kimono that hangs in my house, thinking about my own grandfather who served in Okinawa for 2 years during that war. The world moves full circle. Art moves us every day. Every piece of art that hangs in my house tells me a story. If I gaze long enough with my eyes clear and focused, I hear the stories. Some people may only see brushstrokes and color, others gaze at art and see nothing; some look and think, “Oh, I could do that.” My foray into art has taught me how much I can’t do. To me, each canvas is a novel. Even my little bits of color in their cheap frames have something to say, if only to me. If the purpose of storytelling is to connect, then the purpose of art is to connect what we see and what we think we know with the emotions and skill the artist presents to us. We must listen closely to hear it. Sometimes we do—and then we are lucky for there are worlds contained in each painting we encounter.