Painting Poems: The Psychological Portraits of Catherine Prescott

Kate Daniels

Autobiographical Fragment of the Viewer

I NEVER learned how to look at pictures. In the working-class home in which I grew up outside of Richmond , Virginia , in the 1950s and 1960s, most of our walls were bare. Clocks, calendars, framed school photo-portraits, perhaps those tacky plaster cast reliefs the 1950s loved-smiling fish in the bathroom, an oversized fork and knife in the kitchen-these might be found in the houses where I lived and visited, but not art. The only two paintings I remember seeing in my family's home were a garish reproduction of Gainsborough's The Blue Boy and a small, mass-produced painting of a tutu-ed ballerina en pointe, her impossibly thin waist encircled by the hands of her male partner, a piece I thought incredibly elegant and erudite (and which now hangs in my daughter's bedroom next to a poster of Britney Spears and a gorgeously sinuous pink and blue watercolor she created at her Waldorf preschool when she was four years old). A particularly cruel dimension of poverty is its parsimonious reckoning of basic human needs: food, plus shelter. Aesthetic needs rarely rise to the surface of most poor people's consciousnesses. It is likely that in the context of poverty the craving for aesthetic experience remains unrecognized as need or necessity, unidentifiable. But the cost of this blindness is high. The violent narratives and vulgar accoutrements of so many impoverished lives can be no accident. The psychoanalyst Leon Grinberg has said, "Without a minimum of beauty, the burden of life could not be born." Yes. Without art to translate for us the ambiguous intensities of our lives, we exist in a kind of emotional hell-whirling and spinning through the darkness of undifferentiated, undiscriminated feeling that declines to reveal any pattern to us. Thus, without art, we go through our days in a kind of stupor or fog, waiting for something we cannot even name.

I didn't hear classical music until I was five, when my kindergarten teacher played the Grand Canyon Suite and led us in an interpretative movement exercise. And I didn't see "real" pictures until I was taken to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on a school field trip sometime in middle childhood. In both cases, the effect was of having a thirst of long duration suddenly and amazingly quenched. Interior walls were flattened, and I passed over them into a new world of sight and sound where I have lived ever since. Here is the end of a poem I recently wrote about the experience:

And when I turned
from the harsh click of the needle's arm resettling
itself in its metal saddle, the world was stained glass,
my body a delicate canvas of skin over bone.
Something had once been painted there beautifully
and with care. And if it had worn away over the years,
or grown encased in a kind of shell? I suddenly saw
I could get back my beauty. I could peck my way out
like any young god, or a duckling, the black swan
hatching in a nest of white, the dark hum
of music in a small, tight place that resists
giving way till the final moment. Then it shudders
apart in an orgy of exit, and the shell- the shell cracks open.

Out of the Shell

Looking at pictures, of course, is not the same as understanding them. And because I was not talented as an artist-I was one of those children who never learned to draw an identifiable dog or represent accurately the shoulders on human figures-an understanding of composition and movement in pictures never became part of my aesthetic repertoire. As a graduating senior at the University of Virginia in the spring of 1975, I took my first and only art history class: a survey of western art that required me to purchase H.W. Janson's gargantuan History of Art. To my shock, years later, I discovered that it included no works by women. What it did include, however, was portraits, many of them images of, if not by, women. And part of my entrancement-it is not too strong a word-with that art history course was the introduction it offered to the art of portraiture. I was enraptured by the human image: the famous Eakins portraits that dovetailed so neatly with my study of nineteenth-century American literature and society; Rembrandt's lively, dynamic representations of his young wife that laid such fertile ground for my reading, five years hence, of John Berger's Ways of Seeing; the emotional expressiveness of Picasso's portraits and self portraits; Vermeer's haunting girl with a pearl earring. I loved looking into those faces and imagining them looking back. I was experiencing the eros of looking, though I did not know enough then to name it that.

One thing I did understand immediately was that the act of looking upon images of other human beings who had actually existed at points in time was different from looking at abstract images or landscape paintings, and different again from looking at Renaissance portrayals of biblical or mythological scenes. To look at portraits was to engage with the images of people who might have looked back had I passed them on the street. Who, now, in the eternal afterlife of art, were regarding me, making me see myself in a new way, pressuring me to articulate what I saw in the face of the other, forcing me to a reckoning with that image and all that it conjured, and to a reckoning with myself as well. These images required a different kind of attention, I felt. One must not peruse them cursorily and walk away, or speak disparagingly or dismissively of them, for they once walked the earth like ourselves, strove (also like ourselves) to get safely to the end of the day, and to do so without harming themselves or others. One possessed, I felt, a special responsibility as a viewer of portraits. I sensed a moral dimension to looking at them that airlifted me out of the formal and technical confinements of painting and set me down in the bulls-eye of an infinitely more intimate and complex universe. I found it impossible to forget-even as I enjoyed myself looking-that these were real people locked in the images. I did not want to forget. My looking unlocked them, and I went to portraits precisely because I desired a representation of human interaction. I wanted a dynamic engagement that involved me, the artist, the subject, and the technical identity of the work all at the same time. As I loved the great narrative movements of the nineteenth century historically based novels (those of Dickens and Tolstoy, in particular), I loved portraits of that era, as well. I wanted to be drawn in, not to view from a distance. I wanted not just myself, and not just the artist and myself, not the dyad of the couple, but the convocation of family. I wanted people. I wanted to look at art made of people, from people, by a person who loved and understood people. I wanted-all those years before I ever saw them-to look at the portraits that would later be painted by Catherine Prescott.

Looking at People

To look at portraits, of course, is to look at people. Or: it is to look at images or representations of people as the artist saw them. Or: it is to look at one part-a fragment, perhaps, or a sliver-of what the artist thought he or she saw in the subject. If a portrait appears to us as a coherent whole, what do we make of that? What do the subjects of portraits make of the images that represent them?

For instance: what is Prescott 's Reuben thinking as he stares ruminatingly from within the image she has created of him? Reuben, You Have My Ear, she has called the piece [see Plate 4], but it is our eye that he captures, with his rough ruddiness, serious eyes, and sensuous lips so at war with the rest of his demeanor. His head and torso are held in the image. Just that-no background details, no clues. Within his glorious starkness, we are incarcerated. What is the dark corona that forms the perimeter of the head? The head dominates the canvas. This Reuben is beautiful in his sensuousness, but terrible in his composure. He interrogates us about what we think of him, as we ponder what he imagines of us. He is Asian, and some of us, like the artist herself, are not. What questions is he raising about race and identity? Otherness and sameness? The familiar and the strange? And what are we asking ourselves as we look upon this dark and somber beauty? As we trace the strange, curving bump on the top of his head with our eyes, as we would with our hands were he our child or our lover....

Looking at Prescott 's People

It is not easy to look at the people in the portraits of Catherine Prescott. One would not go to these paintings to relax, or merely to entertain the eye. Their power-which proceeds first from the artist's phenomenal mastery of her technique-is what I will call assaultive. Perhaps she will not care for that adjective. Nor would I, I suspect, were it applied to my poems. Nevertheless, it is the right word. Or one of the right words. Prescott 's portraits refuse to be ignored, and the piercing sweetness with which her images enter us carves a new place inside. It is a place characterized by both praise and groaning. Like the Psalms of the Old Testament, each piece carries its own light, its own darkness, its own celebrating and grieving. There is no tepidness in these works, and while there is beauty, there is no easy solace. They are bread, but it is bread baked in a place that has lived through famine. Perhaps it is this polarity that imposes the particular intensity of Prescott 's images. Imbued with light and graced with a remarkable likeness of form, they please even while they pain, perplex, and, sometimes, almost bring us to panic.

In a piece like Anna with Her Father, Jake [see Plate 3], our eye acknowledges a dyadic portrait of a conservatively dressed, middle-aged, middle class white father seated behind his flamingly beautiful and seductively dressed biracial daughter. She stands, while he is seated. Her posture is erotically assertive, the energy of youth and beauty bursting from her. He is a depository of stasis, and we invent for him a life of sitting. Perhaps he is an accountant, an attorney, a therapist. He sits all day in just this way-semi-weary, but steady and reliable, too. He will be there when we need him. He seems kind. We assume something about his politics-left of center, not afraid to live in the margins. In a society still uneasy about racial mixing, he has chosen a wife of color and created a biracial daughter. Certain of us will admire him for that, might wish to be like him, living those ideals, unafraid of that difference, unthreatened by the criticism of others. We might chuckle, if we live with adolescents ourselves, at the contrast between the grave and thoughtful paterfamilias and the corn-rowed, spike-haired, punkishly-garbed daughter. Her clothes are too small. She is showing too much skin. What does that mean? A throwback, perhaps, to her childhood? Or a gesture ahead to the many undressings that await her? This daughter is a mystery: like so many adolescents, she is already halfway out of the picture. Carrying her new secrets with her, she is headed down the road leading away from childhood, into the future of her life as a sexual adult.

Though the piece pleases us initially with its muted palette of grays and tans, the beauty of the young woman, and the reassuring way that Prescott has placed the figures in close relation to each other (and intensified that reassurance by the title which identifies unequivocally their relationship), these features of the painting pass into and through us rather quickly. They are easily digested. And then we are left staring and being stared at, trying to identify the other elements of the piece that are not so muted, not so pleasing, not so willing to present themselves for apprehension and categorization. What makes this one of Prescott 's most challenging works, even while it is one of her most beautiful? What other feelings are unraveling from the canvas? If we stand there long enough, if we are brave enough to submit ourselves to the vision, if we open ourselves to the darkness as well as the light, eventually it surfaces. As the therapist waits patiently and without judgment for the jangled emotions of her client to emerge for sorting, Prescott 's portraits wait for us to prepare a place inside to receive their vision. With a little jolt, it settles inside us: the anger uncoiling from the daughter; its stubborn smokiness, the hard edge, or rind, it gives her body. But a more uncomfortable emotion is there, too, burrowing into the place we have made: a sexual tension between father and daughter. As if a match has just been struck, we still smell its sulfur. We notice a twin carnality of cocked elbows and slightly parted thighs in the young woman and the older man. Their bodies meet in a seam at the center of the frame, where her forearm slides down the slope of his shoulder. His is an air of knowledge, hers of just-punctured innocence. The dialectic moves back and forth on the tracks of a narrative we have known forever.

One of the things this painting can teach us-if we can bear to know it-is the fragile nature of the boundary between propriety and transgression. We do not want to see this in the portrait of any father and daughter, but it is undeniably there. Prescott has caught, as she so often does, the sexual energy roiling within all human encounter, the beauty of that fundamental generative and creative eros. Her incisive psychological intelligence pulls us constantly into the unthinkable, the unbearable. Always she is showing us-through the images of what we enjoy seeing-how much we know that we didn't understand we knew. Sometimes, we would like to take this awareness and pack it away in the drawers of one of the dark cupboards that edge into the frame of Anna with Her Father, Jake, but it is too late for that. The match has been struck. In the dark, we cannot help but see. We already know what we didn't want to know, and now we must trust in the long slice of creamy yellow light that emanates from the cracked, black door. Yes, the door is black, but it is open. And light: light pours through.

Looking into Faces

Looking at Prescott 's portraits, I have often been put in mind of the act of looking that takes place between mother and infant. As I look into the faces of the subjects in the portraits that most compel me- Anna with Her Father, Jake; Kevin and Uncle Bill [see front cover]; Reuben, You Have My Ear; Grace at Our Door [see Plate 2]-I feel that same erotic tug that overtook me in the presence of my own three babies: the deep fastening of eye on eye, image on image, drinking and drinking. The dynamic is entirely psychical, but is experienced as profoundly and corporeally as a bridge one might walk across, traversing the distance between the strangeness of one's own experience and the equal strangeness of someone else's.

That might be one reason we go to portraits: to traverse the distance between self and other, again and again. To walk back and forth between you and me.

"She has painted my poems!"

I am a narrative poet who writes poems to bridge the distance between the solitude of self and the strangeness of other, to make and to believe in community, to experience the grace of connection. I suspect there might be a natural bond between portrait painting and narrative poetry. A portrait presents a version of a person other than the artist. Any sophisticated viewer understands that nevertheless, what we see on the canvas is as much the artist's subjective vision as an image of the sitter. Though painting an other, the artist is undeniably there, imprinted in the image of the ways she saw the other. And though we may talk on and on about the presence of the painter in any work, it seems to me that there must be as fundamental a difference between portrait painting and-let's say-landscape painting as there is between narrative and lyric poetry. While lyric poetry is mostly concerned with an evocation of the poet's self, narrative poetry is more social. One might even say that, as narrative poetry serves a social purpose, the writing of narrative poetry is essentially a social act. The core of narrative poetry is conceived in the crucible of community (in the near-words of another poet), where the assumption of an audience creates an awareness of the presence of the other. Portrait painting emanates from a similar act of community-making. If lyric poetry might be thought of as privileging the subjectivity of the poet and his or her emotional state, narrative poetry and portrait painting express an essentially non-soliloqual urge: to speak not just to the universe, but to an identifiable other, to someone who is imagined to be really there, at that moment. I think of Stephen Crane's little poem when I think of lyric poetry:

A man said to the universe:

"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

It takes a great faith to launch a lyric poem into the universe in the face of such cynicism or disavowal. Perhaps it requires a different kind of faith to launch a narrative poem, or a portrait, into the world. Perhaps we do so not because we are feeling alone in the universe, but because we are not.

Likeness

Among the first things that strike one about Prescott 's work is her prodigious talent for likeness. She once tried to explain it to me, but as someone who never learned to draw a decent pair of shoulders, I could not understand the way that identifiable personal features coalesce beneath her hands the way words appear beneath mine. "It's just something I've always been able to do," she said.

There is something communal about likeness. To find the likeness in the other is to discover in which ways the other can be recognized and claimed. Likeness is a kind of humility, insofar as it allows the other be what it is. Likeness is not controlling, but kind, gentle, and accepting. The wrinkles in Uncle Bill's face, the faint curl of involuntary adolescent displeasure or disgust on Grace's face as she stands in the doorway of her parents' bedroom, the bizarrely compelling bump on the crown of Reuben's close-shaved head, the harsh, slablike falls of destroyed flesh in the portrait of the artist's dying mother-the paintings do not prettify these things, but at the same time the beauty in them is allowed to rise to the surface. This, perhaps, is the twin impulse of relationship and community: the base and foundation of likeness.

Broken / Light

The way Prescott uses light in her paintings-dramatically, sometimes almost melodramatically-is the technique that compels me most. Light in her work immediately calls up its other, darkness. And it is the way in which the surfaces of her portraits are ruptured by un-imaged darkness that pulls me in so profoundly, that brings me to the metaphor of brokenness that resides, omnipresent, in all of her works. Though the narratively composed surfaces of the works suggest a kind of wholeness, it is a wholeness after the fact of brokenness. It is Christ's brokenness being reworked into a new wholeness. In this brokenness, we sense a wholeness we cannot yet see or touch, and we must submit to its paradox in order to experience un-brokenness.

Prescott 's paintings are radical in their insistence on this: in their poignant but dignified discourse on brokenness and healing. So often, the surfaces of the people we see in these paintings are unattractively broken, and yet, as we hold them in our gaze, bonding with them, they are reassembled by our desire to connect with them, to see them not as parts but as wholes, to become part of them in the way that we might become part of a narrative poem. To be not alone, but with someone because we believe it is possible to be with someone . And in believing that, to be healed.

Body, Brokenness, Light

To look upon the aged body of the woman sitting on the bed before the light-filled window in Her Back to Me [see Plate 1] is a painful act. All the backs that have turned themselves to us reside there. Gazing upon her, we are shut out, excluded, walked away from. In our own eyes, we diminish and shrink. We feel a tightening inside, and that blanching flush of imminent tears.

A mother, she has turned her ruined body away from us so that we may not see the mutilated breast where we once nursed. The breast, now destroyed, was the world to us. Before we knew ourselves, that breast was us. In the gnarled, boundary-less identity of brand new babies, breast, mother, and hungry infant are all one thing, knotted up together, ancient and original. Each time milk ran from the breast, desire was fulfilled, and expectation rested.

Now it is many years since milk ran. The fountain no longer flows, and the body of the mother-once so pliant, so moist, so open to us-is desiccated. The body that once meant everything faces naked into the light outside. The light quivers creamily, barely held back by the pane of glass. Soon, our mother must decide whether to proceed into the light, or to remain there on the bed, diminishing inside the dark husk of her body, refusing for eternity and lost to us forever.

I linger over this woman's naked body, the hideous mystery of it and the extraordinary foreclosure of the image of her privacy. Decades ago, life throve in her body, and when it was time, her perimeters gave way, and new life, with its own rhythms and demands, its own fresh energy, pushed free. Now that energy is gone, and the monument that remains is awful to peruse. Looking upon it, I touch my own body more tenderly, finger the soft folds and falls of childbearing flesh that will never, in this life, lie flat again. There is a kind of horror in the painted body I touch with my eyes. And there is horror in the body I touch with my hands, as well.

Does it hurt to paint like this? I wonder, imagining the artist at her work, seeing her in my mind's eye in her slate-colored, many windowed studio. I see her own post-childbearing body, the pictures of her children that surround her. I see her look of seriousness, the brush at ease in her hand, the pleasing curve of her gray hair, the sweet tentativeness that sometimes overtakes her demeanor when she intuits someone else's pain. Of course it would hurt to paint like this. One must enter the unbearable darkness and then find the way out. One must imagine the light toward which to paint.

Her Back to Me is a kind of tutorial on the work of Catherine Prescott. It offers all of the paradoxical and dualistic elements of her extraordinary vision: body, brokenness, light. There is the body destroyed and retreating, and there is the window advancing with its Eucharistic offering of lemony light. Beyond the brokenness of this body, beyond the brokenness of all human bodies, a wholeness awaits. It is in the light, as it so often is in the paintings of Catherine Prescott. We need only turn toward it.

Visit Kate Daniels as Image Artist of the Month for May 2001 and Catherine Prescott as Image Artist of the Month for November 2004.

Issue #36•Fall 2002