39. Hope Brooks Meryman (1931-1975)

( "Dove" by Hope Meryman, 1960s)


I missed class this last week because I was up in San Francisco attending the opening of an exhibit presented by a group called Lost Art Salon, which features historically significant and rediscovered artists whose work hails from 1970 or before.

My aunt Hopie died of cancer in 1975 at the age of 44 (my current age). She was a woodcut artist and a watercolorist primarily, whose prints and paintings still hang on all our walls, an enduring reminder of her talent, her eye, and her spirit, which was indelible. I was nine when she died. I’ve known a lot of people who have died since 1975. Few if any, are as present to me as she is. I can summon her voice in a second. I can picture her walking in my shed right now with every detail in tact, right down to cuff of her jeans. She has been here ever since, and maybe that’s because her paintings have remained such a constant in of our lives. Maybe that’s because she had such a strong personality. Maybe there’s no real difference between those two things.

In any case, through the efforts of her younger daughter – my cousin, Helena – a lot of those familiar prints, as well as some I hadn’t seen before, are once again on public view, providing occasion to look at Hopie’s work, and to reflect upon her life and approach, and see what can be learned from one who went before.

Hopie was my mother’s sister, the eldest of the brood that made painting the signature practice of the family. Three more of her sisters went on to become artists. She herself married the son of an extremely talented New England portraitist and landscape painter, who turned out to be a mentor to my other aunt (the one I attend class with), who in turn spawned two children of my generation who also show and sell successfully. The gene at question would seem to trace to my grandfather, Robert Brooks, several of whose letters to my grandmother from the front of the Great War contain sketches that would, had he chosen to pursue them further, have put him comfortably in the Maxfield Parrish School – but he did not. He became a rancher, and so (or so I have always assumed) we have Hopie to thank and to blame for being our creative pioneer, the first one danged fool enough to think there was room in the world for another artist with integrity.

And I use the term advisedly. I have long tried to gauge the nature of the ambition of my painting kin, to compare it to my own, basically because I think that as artists go, they are a remarkably healthy-minded bunch – almost to a fault. Some of that may have to do with the nature of the painting – a more sanguine activity than writing. Some of it may have to do with the fact that, though all approached their work with a clear professional eye and aspiration, none ever had to shoulder the burden of being the main breadwinner in their families. Still, the art game can be just as ugly as the writing game, fraught with just as many opportunities to lose focus, to forget why you’re doing this, to please the wrong masters and get caught up in destructive resentments and self-pity. And it’s true for anyone who has ever tried to climb a professional ladder, no matter how high or low you are, all you ever really see is the ass of the person just ahead of you. And that’s no fun...Unless you’re a dancer. I guess.

Among the artists and painters in my family, however, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of Rung Envy. I could be wrong, but of the lot, I’ve always suspected Hopie might have been the most at risk. She was a little more fiery than her sisters, and it can’t have been easy working in New York in the 60s when a lot of “important” careers were just beginning to explode. Also, of the sisters, she always seemed to me to the clearest, or most overt, in her determination to work and keep working. That’s not to say she was any more prolific than the others, just that they – my mother, her sister, my cousins even – are all incredibly, almost preternaturally, discreet in the way that they go about their work and their careers, finding ways to fit it in that make it seem, in addition to all the rest they do, a little like a magic trick – attending their openings to find out everything they’ve managed to get done while you weren’t looking. With Hopie, though, it always seemed a little more clear that you were renting her attention – from the work, I mean, and I mean that in the best, most laudable way. Even when I was six I understood that if you really really want to spend time with her, you should probably grab a pad and a pencil.

Whether that level of focus and determination ever spilled over into professional frustration, I have no idea. All I can say, having now returned from the exhibit up north, is that her work shows no trace of pollution. Quite the opposite, it’s about as centered as any statement can be.

In the first place, there is the medium. As I mentioned, she was a watercolorist as well, but the Lost Art show focused on woodcuts, the most mediating of mediums. All woodcuts are ultimately experiments, the success of failure of which depend upon elements over which the artist has not all that much control: the tackiness of the paper, the paint, the humidity of the air, but most of all, the wood. By the artist’s choice, the knots and the grain are the texture of the work and God’s gift to it, the source of all the happy accidents for which all artist are ever in search.

The woodcut artist has furthermore sacrificed the immediacy of her own line, since all the lines must be carveable and carved. That’s what provides the end-products their built-in tension: the blockiness and stolidity and flatness of the printed shapes versus the grace of the artist’s line, which in Hopie’s case so often chose to depict moving things – athletes, animals, children at play. All are stamps of life, with all the paradox that phrase entails.

And yet as much as she gave up, or gave over, to the wood in terms of line and texture, she took back in her choice of subject matter. Again, more so than for the sisters who followed her, subject matter is a pronounced feature of Hopie’s work. Not to say that her sisters don’t make careful and purposeful decision about what to paint, but in the grand scheme of things, they are never very spectacular decisions – nature based, light based, commonplace, closely observed, and all informed by the same basic understanding that it is the artist’s job to play the hand she is dealt, draw beauty from the subject, any subject – any flower, any tree, any hill -- through their own gifts and limitations. To put another way, what they choose to paint is not quite as important as how they paint it, and this puts them in league with the vast majority of working artists and writers.

Not so with Hopie (and in this respect I suspect I may feel an abiding kinship.) What she chose to look at WAS the point. To stand before a print by Hopie is to have one’s attention forcefully directed to what interested her, to the point that she often let her subjects float in the open space of the page (not something any of her sister would ever do, at least for the purpose of showing in a gallery). And that makes sense, of course, given the burden of woodcutting. The sheer labor intensivity of the process almost requires an extra-delight in the subject. It’s only such delight that sustains one through the labor. (If it took a sledgehammer to type every letter on a keyboard, I warrant there'd be fewer novels that take place in kitchens and living rooms.) Hopie’s choices were, as such, a little more varied, a little more idiosyncratic, a little more focused: A pigeon with its wings inverted downwards; two lacrosse players shouldering into one another; even the flow of a river around reeds and rocks has clearly been chosen for its design element – a forced collaboration of water and wood. Her decisions are all deliberately made, but fondly and personally and with the complete confidence of an interested, and interesting, observor.

Combine these basic features of her art – the generous surrender to the medium, the equally generous delight in and fascination with the subject – there’s not a lot of room left for preening or preciousness or any of the other things that, fragrant as they may seem at the moment of conception, wind up stinking in the long run (and no, the irony of the sentence is not lost). But it’s likely because of that – the presence of such a confident guide, the absence of any self-interest or self-consciousness – that Hopie’s prints and watercolors make for such pleasing company. I know to certain ears that may not sound like the nicest thing to say about a person’s Art – should Art not on some level displease, trouble, fester, etc. etc.? Maybe, but again it’s the quiet but powerful companionship her work provides that helps account for the fact that it holds up so well, witness the fact that pretty much everything hanging last weekend sold, which the more you think about it is kind of amazing. Art does age, after all, and nothing ages quite so quickly or hideously as a painting or a book or a song conceived to please the current arbiters of taste; most popular art becomes artifact in one spin of a wheel. That a forty-year-old print, attached to no great name or reputation, should find such instant appeal among of gang of strangers – and make no mistake, the buyers here were strangers to us all - speaks volumes, both about the work and its maker.

But to spare yourself any more of those volumes, the reader is invited to go see Hopie’s work for him or herself here. My final point, in context of this blog, dedicated to exploring and expanding the broader creative context in which I am trying to see my own efforts, is to express not just my renewed admiration for the work of a departed relative, but also just how comforting, how reaffirming and correcting I find it to be reminded of the legacy to which I was born and in which I was raised – as opposed, for instance, to the literary legacy I seem to having such trouble discerning. More so at this moment than ever, and at these crossroads, I do well to remember that, however high or low the writing takes me, I am in the end just another one of the Brookses, and I would have it no other way.

So thank you, Hopie, and thank you, Helena.

Next Post: Last Class of the Semester.

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1. Introduction: on New York and sublimation

It was a little over two years ago now that my family left New York City. My wife and I had been bouncing around Manhattan, from apartment to apartment, for a dozen or so years, and I've lived there on and off since I was born. New York is home to me in a way that no other place ever will be, so much so that the idea of explaining why – ascribing it to the seasons, the wheeze of the uptown bus, or the early morning groan and belch of the garbage truck - all strike me as a writerly affectation. These are not preferences to me, or pleasures. They are sewn into me. They are my comfort food, and the way I think life should sound and smell and irritate.

Even after two and a half years away, the feeling of loss and displacement is still remarkably raw. When I see New York on television, I ache. I can’t watch Sesame Street with my children; I have to leave the room. When I leaf through the photo album of our last two years there, I feel as if I’m looking at pictures of a deceased lover. Not that she is dead. I know she isn’t. Not that we won’t be back, I’m sure we will, barring injury, but I also know what they say about stepping in the same river twice.

What makes the pain especially acute is that the year or so right before we left was an extraordinarily happy time for us, owing mainly to the fact that the prior seven years had been so sad. My wife and I had desperately wanted to have children, but couldn’t seem to find a way. We traveled the long and lonely roads of Reproductive Technologies and then adoption. We felt all the desperation that comes, and the financial and emotional devastation, and for a while there it looked like nothing would come of our efforts and that our lives were slipping away.
But all that changed. Under circumstances I’ve written about elsewhere, we were visited in relatively quick succession by two moments of grace the nature and extent of which would likewise be vain to try to capture here in words. Suffice to say that for one couple, in the space of one lifetime, to have felt so cursed and then so blessed in one and the same regard is, from a pure storytelling perspective, a little de trop. And you will say, "Well that’s they way it works, isn’t it? Deprivation breeds gratitude. Love begets grief.” And I will say, ‘Yes, but no.” Trust me, no pat psycho-dialectic comes even close to explaining whatever the hell went on, and goes on, with us. Truly, Richard Dawkins can kiss my ass.

That last couple years we were all living on West 91st St, a half block from the park and all its playgrounds, the horse path, the reservoir, the Great Lawn, the Met, the Museum of Natural History. My wife was teaching two blocks away. Our son, at 3, was attending his first year of pre-school. Our daughter was newly arrived. Her crib was in our bedroom, and we were squeezed in there but happy. I was trying to finish a book, so for mental space, I joined a private library across the park, where for a nominal fee I was given access to a small complex of working spaces up on the top level of a very handsome, old world mansion made of white stone, polished marble, burnished wood and stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

So my days proceeded: dropping one child off at school, leaving the other with our sitter whom we loved almost as much as the kids, cutting across the park from 91st to 79th, putting in as honest a day’s work as a writer can, (which isn’t too, granted), grabbing a small lunch at Don Filippo, maybe sneaking an espresso back in among the stacks, then returning in the late afternoon to an apartment brimming with the brand of joy that only two toddlers – and these two in particular – plus seven prior years of agony and loneliness, spent variously in clinics, lawyers offices, and orphanages – can bring. That kind of joy. It was a very special time in our lives, and mine, where everywhere I turned, I felt that I was home and where I should be, doing what I should be doing. Finally.

The only real fly in the ointment, and it was a pretty big fly, was money. For the reasons already alluded to, as well as my refusal to do anything other than try to finish that novel (despite the fact that for the first time in my career I had no advance and no publisher), we were accruing some pretty serious debt. My wife and I had long discussed the possibility of trying California for a few years at some point. She had family there. I had family there. Fallow dwellings and related connections tendered the prospect of slightly cheaper living, so we decided maybe the time had come to head on out, just to get our financial house in order, and to enjoy our children’s pre-school years. We weren’t closing the door on New York, by any means. We sublet the apartment on 91st, but still deep down we knew, as our cab drove us and our carseats, our strollers and diapers and overstuffed luggage out to the airport, we were leaving behind a golden moment that we would probably never recapture.

We had no great cause to complain. The ensuing flight landed us in what is surely one of the most beautiful places on earth, tucked between the foothills of the Santa Ynez Range on one side and the calm Pacific on the other, further tempered by the Channel Islands that chisel the horizon whenever the morning fog lifts. It is the land of my wife’s youth, and my mother’s youth as well, and we are surrounded by a lot of extended family with whom we get along swimmingly. So there were a slew of ways to distract and console my sense of loss. Perhaps I’d finally discover my green thumb. Or try my hand at a “New York” novel. Did Rachmaninov not write his most ‘Russian’ music wile he was traveling abroad? Did Dvorak not compose his most ‘Bohemian’ music while living in the United States? Of course he did. He was living in Manhattan, for heaven’s sake.

So I tried and I try, but still one has to be honest with oneself and recognize: Given who I am, given what I do, given the sorts of things that make my juices flow, the northern tip of Southern California (or the southern tip of the Central Coast, I’ve never really been sure), for all its Edenic beauty, is probably not a place that I would ever have chosen to live on my own. And that’s not even to say I don’t think I should be here – there’s value in being taken out of your comfort zone – but as I said to a sister-in-law not long after moving, living out here would be my personal version of Black Like Me. Those who know me will attest, the mere fact that there is a lawnmower parked in my garage right now – that’s two punch-lines right there. So yes, I admit it has been a challenge figuring out how to continue to be creative and productive and dry and constructive – how to be me as I understood me to be – without the help and guidance of countless filthy pigeons.

If joining that private library on 79th Street was the smartest thing I did before leaving New York, the smartest thing I’ve done, by far, since coming to California was to accept my aunt’s invitation to join her at the lifedrawing class she attends every Thursday evening at the Adult Ed Center in Santa Barbara.

But wait, that’s not quite as pathetic as it sounds. I come from a family of artists, mostly of the paint and easel variety. My mother is one. Three of her sister are, or were. Two of my cousins are, and I myself drew a lot as a kid, enough at least that if you’d asked me back then what I was going to be when I grew up, I probably would have sighed and said “artist.” So it’s in the blood. When my aunt invited me to join her, I said absolutely. Lifedrawing would be my bowling night, a chance to get out of the house, see other humans, draped and un-draped, either way was fine.

When I first joined, the class was being taught by Jorgen Hansen (no relation). Jorgen had been running the workshop, or something like it, for some forty years, during which time he had gathered around him a devoted following, a kind of core unit of now middle-aged to twilit artists who could be counted on to drift in and out of the doors, pending weekly availability. Coming in the escort of my aunt, an esteemed member of that unit, I felt both very much like a newbie, but also an initiate. My parents knew Jorgen as well from way back when they were all drinking and driving much too fast, and from the moment he made the connection, I think he found my presence a little disarming. Whenever he looked at me, I had the distinct feeling his life was flashing before his eyes.

Aside from that, the space was a comfortable one for me, as was the task at hand. I’ve always preferred drawing to painting, and the subject matter happens to be the one that interests me the most: humans and their attitudes. So it didn’t take long for the class to assume a fairly important role in maintenance of my psychic well-being, fragile as it was in my new surroundings. Lifedrawing was, and still is, the one thing I’ve done since moving out here that I’m quite sure is correct, to the point that I find it kind of strange that I wasn’t doing the same thing back in the city. It’s as if those three hours a week I spend in room 23 are the missing puzzle-piece of my life in New York, magically turned up here, in the Schott Center in Santa Barbara.

But my purpose here is not to tell tales or violate the sanctity of that space with much in the way of anecdote or description. That could be fun, but I think it’s best to honor the tacit compact of all who enter, that what happens in room #23 should probably stay there, at least as far as the others are concerned. For myself, my hope is simply to provide a small window into the room, the one framing the models, framing the sketches, and (when properly lit) reflecting my own experience as I drew them, including the occasional rumination about the role that art, artists, and drawing has played in my life; how that process, for me, compares to writing; and how that rediscovery has helped me cope with the various frustrations that life has been meting out, including the lingering sense of disorientation I feel, separated from the place that bore me, suckled me, weaned me, taught me, deflowered me, and seems at the moment not to care for me all that much, but who knows, maybe I started it.

Let me begin , then, with this: It was the formidable tag-team of Nietzsche and then Freud who first identified the concept of sublimation. Others added their twist later on, but the basic idea is that in order to remain citizens in good standing, we all have to find ways of suppressing our most dangerous impulses – the violent, the perverse, the anti-social, and the sexual, needless to say. We do this by re-channeling them into some more creative and socially acceptable outlet; by substituting what we think we can get away with for what we really want. This process is called sublimation. All art is sublimation. Without it, we’d all just go ahead and murder our parents.

I don’t mean to predispose the viewer. The drawings here are many things. They are what they are. They’re a father’s chance to get out of the house one night a week; a writer’s opportunity to reacquaint himself with an old neglected friend. They are, in certain select cases, the live sublimation of the clear desire for that which they portray; but even more – and here my justification for the lengths of this preamble – they are also obviously an expression of longing. And maybe it all goes back to the fact that I really didn’t draw that much during the prior two or three decades, but I can’t help feeling there’s something in the various elements that the drawings posted here combine – the grubbiness, the soot and butcher-paper tone, the nakedness, to say nothing of the peace of mind that drawing them all has brought me – that leads me to think that they are, among other things, a cunning sublimation of the one most enduring desire I’ve felt since taking up the charcoal again – or since taking up residence in this beautiful garden by the sea - to still be fucking the streets of New York City.
Next Post: three drawings of Jorgen Hansen.