Mimi in the Mirror
Reflecting on my mother's early self-portraits ...
Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
The iPad did not smudge. And you could erase your last action without damaging your drawing. This was thrilling after my fraught adolescent efforts, which were sometimes so overworked they left paper sores. When the iPad came out, I tried drawing again and at first made them with just a simple line. I sent one to my mother over email.
“Many lines!,” she told me. “Make many lines!” She was quoting someone famous.
Yesterday, I looked that up.
“Faites des lignes. Faites beaucoup de lignes.” (“Draw lines - draw a lot of lines”) Ingres had advised a young Degas.
My mother once mentioned to me that she had wasted a period of her art education when the Magic Marker was first invented. Her art school teacher told her that her work had suffered when she took it up.
She wished the woman had said something sooner.
I remembered that story when I found sketchbook after sketchbook with pages made with a black marker in the loft; the drawings were blunt and lacked sensitivity. I threw those notebooks away.
But this week, I came across a water-damaged self-portrait among her early works I’d salvaged, and it mesmerized me.
The composition, the way her figure fits into just half the door, the remarkable expression in her eyes, and her concentration—it’s a lot to get from Magic Marker.
And there was something else. Her gaze reminded me of a photo I had somewhere.
I don’t know how she snapped this. But I know that look. She’s drawing herself in a mirror.
The image thrilled me when I saw it because it stands out among the 50s-girl portraits many of us have of our mothers: images of young women posing on the laps of their dates.
I swear those photos sparked when they came near her early self-portraits.
Sparks that her journals turned into flames.
Love how you weave your narrative around drawings, paintings, and photos. I can't wait until the next installment.
I wish Mimi could know how lucky she is to have had you as her daughter!!