Issue 32: Four Portraits + Violet, A Story in Words and Pictures by Deborah Stein
"I thought I was painting flowers as an escape from two years of mourning my mother’s death and searching for ancestors who were my ghosts..."
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Four Portraits + Violet, A Story in Words and Pictures | Deborah Stein
Preface
I began these written portraits last Spring when I was with a group of writers in Provincetown and a friend suggested we each write a small self-portrait, a snippet of ourselves. I meant to do that, but quickly the writing became what it wanted to be: multiple portraits not of myself, maybe too, myself.
Later I’d ride to the next town over and see a long stand of small identical holiday huts. They were whitely painted with green trim, backs to the bay and a turquoise sky, identical except that over each of their old doors was written the name of a flower: Salvia, Rose, Tulip, Dahlia, Violet, etc. I learned they were famous on the Cape and my crush on them developed fast. I had been writing about death for two years and it was Spring, so I promptly set off to write to the little huts named for flowers, maybe to find myself in them. I wrote to the huts, to the flowers and to whatever might occur from the naming of a thing.
In terms of painted things, when I first began to paint flowers last winter, I figured the flowers were an escape from other painted things. I had been obsessively painting scenes from Pinocchio, but then imaginary flowers started showing up, and they seemed to want to become real boys too. They wanted life, so I did what they asked of me.
Salvia
Or maybe Salvia was wrong about Rose, wrong all this time.
When she waited behind Rose in their cars in the long line in front of the school to pick up the children or a chance encounter at the public library returning armfuls of middle-grade books or a shopping trip at the supermarket for whatever it was they cooked for supper, she’d noticed Rose’s stunning long fingers, her pale peony painted nails, her store-bought shoes, and felt a world apart from Rose and Rose’s child with ringlets of gold and Puritan collars.
When Rose stopped Salvia in front of the busses where some children waited for rides to bus stops near the city, where Salvia stood smoking a long cigarette made of ash, Rose asked whether she might like to arrange a playdate. Salvia’s reply, without stopping to consider, “I don’t even have a child here in the school. I don’t even have a car. I don’t even know how to cook or make myself clean in the way I think you’d want Rose, in the way I think you’d need. I don’t sing or have medical insurance and I have been picking quills out of my back for decades.” Salvia’s answer encircled Rose in an exhalation of smoke, miles of it, enough smoke to hide an even larger atmosphere than the one they shared now…
Read Four Portraits + Violet, A Story in Words and Pictures on KHÔRA.
Deborah Stein is an artist and writer who lives between New York City and Northern New Mexico with her partner James and their little dog Pablo. Her second solo show, VIBRANT MATTER is at LDBA Gallery in Santa Fe through May 19, 2024. Deborah was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico in January 2023, and was in residency at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA in May 2023. Her art and writing has appeared in Khôra, Rowayat, The First Person and in collaboration with Here Projects. When she isn’t working on her art she’s writing, each is part of the other for her. Both enter into the classes she teaches and her practice lends support to the artists she strives to encourage and inspire through her rogue art school, The StoryCamp Disco.
More Issue 32 Highlights
Issue 32: Meet the new curated team | Featured Artist Charles Ritchie
Issue 32: Part 1: Meet Nadine | by Swati Sudarsan photograph by Michel O’Hara
Issue 32: Air | poem by Jesse Sorrell | sculpture by Sorcha McNamara
Issue 32: Issue 32: dervish; wolf | poem and art by Melissa Leto
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