Over the next few months, I’m working with the Lower Eastside Girls Club, painting portraits of poets for their café walls. The Club is an organization that gives young girls in New York a chance to shape their community: They run their own bakery, broadcast a radio show, take environmentally minded-trips to places like Mexico, and make films documenting what they’re learning.
The club is a grassroots creation that thrives so productively, it gives me massive energy when I’m around it. See its founder Lyn Pentecost in her artillery-attack on bloated capitalism in her Huffington Post blog, here.
Lyn asked me to paint a series of women writers and activists on paper plates to decorate the walls of a café they just opened in my neighborhood. For my next few blogs, I’ll post a painting I’m working on and suggest something that inspires me about that artist’s writing.
A thing about painting: Since I was about 12, I’ve felt like words were perhaps my closest friends. I’ve kept diaries and wanted to be a novelist, and I now teach writing at a college. But since one night in my bedroom at 12 or 13, I’ve also used painting as a way to feel close to those big names I’m reading. Painting helps me feel intimate with otherwise distant faces, because it means a non-verbal connection that feels odder than language does. When painting a portrait, I try to slide into the shape while refusing to think of the words for things, like “eye” and “nose.” When I look at something like Angela Davis’s nose, I want to move my brush over its heaps and indentations without thinking of a typical “nose.”
Painting that activist Angela Davis last week was a struggle largely because I was toggling between overdoing it and underdoing it. I worry a lot about overdoing it when I paint, because I’m the sort of controlling person who can become obsessed with detail at the expense of feeling. Here was the painting early on:
:
And here she was at the end:
At times I was putting too much paint on the plate. In a way, I wanted overdo it, in the spirit of Davis. I wondered when, by piling on colors, I’d lose her. Davis struggled with overdoing engagements with ideas in her own life. Here are the bare bones:
She grew up a black girl in Alabama in the 1940s, a child to two school teachers. She made her way to NYC and then to college at Brandeis, where she became a Sartrian and a Communist. She was jailed in her 20s for associating with radicals (someone killed a judge when trying to free a prisoner, using guns bought in her name. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote the song “Angela,” and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones wrote “Sweet Black Angel,” to show support).
Through her life, she went to France, Germany, and Cuba searching for socialist solutions to American problems. When a student in Germany (living in a former factory), she anxiously watched the formation of the Black Panther Party in the U.S., which pulled her back to a life in the States. She was a feminist who confronted the Black Panthers about their misogyny. She ran for vice-president against Reagan.
These days, she focuses on prison reform, writing books about the subject. She thinks that U.S. prisons are counterproductively sadistic: punishing the desperate without changing things.
My mother said that Davis was “the first person who made me think about what being a woman could look like at its most colorful.” When I tried to paint her, I put my music up loud (Beatles, Fleetwood Mac) and felt like I wanted to be crazy—to get close to her cheek and jaw and hair by losing my common sense. When my friend came over and saw the painting, he said, “you tried to go wild.” I had wanted to.
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
