Books: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

"The Misses Williamson inspired in her the gift of transforming the everyday that has enriched my whole life." Cumming, Laura: On Chapel Sands, Chatto & Windus, London 2019, p.145*

Laura Cumming writes about art like no other critic and with great sensitivity and empathy towards her subjects, evoking the life behind the work. Her books on self-portraits and Velázquez were both outstanding, and her most recent, a memoir about her mother and thus a deeply personal project, is no exception - I read it in April and still think about it almost every day.

The photograph shown in the last image above is reproduced early on in the book and then again at the very end, with a revelation that moved me to tears (not the only time while reading this book) and that has been hinted at in some articles and reviews, but I don't want to include any spoilers here.

Cumming's art critic's eye is evident throughout and she brings alive the art of famous artists (Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus" is central to the book) as well as artworks by her relatives, some acknowledged and celebrated during their lifetime - her father's, who died prematurely of cancer -, others hidden and only freed from obscurity through this labour of love - the photograph that looks like a Vermeer painting, taken by her grandfather, a "travelling salesman who would like to have been an artist", with dreams unfulfilled and buried. Her mother was a gifted artist who gave up painting when she got married, as she felt there "was only room for one painter", but she took up weaving instead, painting compositions with wool.

Cumming unravels her mother's life and the secrets around her disappearance as a young child (when she was abducted from the beach) with the help of images, constructing a biography via the interpretation of pictures both real - photographs, paintings - and those formed in the mind. She also quotes passages from her mother's own memoir, which like her daughter's is beautifully written and was a birthday gift to Laura. The book is suffused with her mother's artistic sensibility and ability to "transform the everyday".

I don't write detailed book reviews here, and I am hesitant to sum up the content. I noticed that a lot of the marketing centered on the kidnapping, a sensationalist approach that is misleading and does the book a disservice. While the book does relate a real-life mystery, there are so many layers to it: It is about family and memory, community and the individual, the psychology of identity and consciousness, art, the power of images and objects, silence and lies, class, the sea, and most importantly, about love in its many forms. It is a delicate and intimate piece of life writing and an exquisite meditation on loss.

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*The US title is Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

See also: Laura Cumming talks about On Chapel Sands in this interview in The New York Times

On scanxiety

Photo taken in Italy last year - my first swim in the sea since my diagnosis

the marks on my back after a session on my 'bed of nails'

"All patients have complicated relationships with their scans [...]. We first learn we have cancer from scans, then learn from them if that cancer has shrunk or disappeared, then learn if it has come back. Scans are like revolving doors, emotional roulette wheels that spin us around for a few days and spit us out the other side. Land on red, we're in for another trip to Cancerland; land on black, we have a few more months of freedom." - Bruce Feiler

I am so relieved that I have 'a few more months of freedom' before my next appointment.

Cancer - or rather my own cancer - hadn't been on my mind that much until the scan date approached. Other things, both in the world at large and my personal life, have been taking up a lot of my mental energy, and when I veer towards fear I ground myself in activities I love, such as painting and reading. My cancer-related thoughts are mainly with people I know who are facing tough decisions or are running out of options. Right now I am lucky.

And yet, knowing too much about my diagnosis, the awareness of the high risk of a recurrence is always at the back of my mind. My therapist once said that any fears we have as humans, when peeled back, ultimately reveal a fear of death. And scanxiety is pretty close to that original fear.

While I was calm overall, the week between the scan and getting the results I felt the familiar tension, and since the scan the fatigue has been acting up.

 

The scans that fall into June are also a painful reminder of what could have been, as my due date was June 30, 2018 - instead, around that time I found myself at my lowest during chemoradiation for the inoperable lung cancer I had been diagnosed with as a fit 34-year old non-smoker (I did have surgery as well, but it is not the standard protocol for the type of stage III the cancer was). I was propped up on our daybed, unable to move and with excruciating side effects that many people would find TMI.

 

In December 2017, after a week of bleeding, I had braced myself for the 12-week scan at the gynaecologist's, willing the image to show growth. Fast-forward to my regular oncology scans, and it is the opposite - staring at different black-and-white images at appointments during treatment, looking for shrinkage and disintegration; the fear when the lymph nodes didn't respond as hoped; and now, post-treatment, always wishing for a 'nothing'. And repeatedly having to confirm I am definitely not pregnant each time so I can have the CT scans.

But all of that is a small price to pay for being able to live a fairly normal life, or a 'new normal' post-cancer life. 

Something that isn't talked about that often is how scanxiety also affects those close to the patient. In fact, it can be worse for family members or spouses. My deepest worries are about how my diagnosis affects John and my family, though I try not to entertain the spiralling thoughts about what might happen. And I am no stranger to what it is like for close relatives - my dad died of cancer and my mum was diagnosed after me. The feeling of helplessness and the fear are definitely worse when it is somebody you love, and I am feeling both right now, as my mum has to have a biopsy because her last check-up didn't go as we had hoped, so there is more waiting.

These days I am frequently reminded of 'lifeshocks' - they keep coming. 

My coping mechanisms include my usual rituals and this time especially the return to sea-swimming and my new 'bed of nails', aka an acupressure mat, a birthday present from John, who knew I wanted one. I sometimes do yoga nidra while on the mat and often fall asleep on it.

Creativity is another tool, and Julia Barnickle's wise words soothed me when I felt overwhelmed. This is what she has to say about scanxiety and anxiety in general - I aspire to her serenity. She also uses the exercises from The Artist's Way and believes creativity to be an important part of her healing.

I read an interview with an actress whose brother had died, and she talked about how around the same time work got very busy for her and the shock gave her a surge in energy. Looking back over shocks big and small I find that to have been true for me at certain points - trauma often paralyses you, but sometimes it can fuel your creativity and productivity.

Speaking of creativity, I am grateful for all the commissions coming my way and am donating half of the money from art sales since my return to work to charities and to our local cancer centre, which has been a great support for the last two years.  

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Here is another article on scanxiety, including tips on how to cope with it.

Also, it would be lying by omission if I didn't admit that sometimes the only thing that works to pause the thoughts is binge-watching a series (most recently Self-Made).

Birthday, houses and home

From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (we sometimes put on subtitles in German if available, as John is learning it, or French or Spanish, as a brush-up exercise, but I put on English subtitles when I rewatched some of this, as there were so many quotes that I wanted to see in writing in addition to hearing the voice; it can add a layer of something I can't quite put my finger on)

‘I realised [the novel Play It as It Lays] was about anticipating Quintana was growing up. I was anticipating separation. […] I was actually working through that separation ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with. In that sense that a novel is a cautionary tale, if you tell the story and work it out all right, then it won’t happen to you.’

Joan Didion, in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

What I paint and what I read and think about and feel, and things that come into my life without my prompting them, seem to constantly interweave in astonishing - or perhaps expected - synchronicity.

It was my birthday yesterday, and talking to my mentor and friend Margie, the themes of home and rebirth and becoming through coming home to ourselves came up. I am working on the painting above, which was also born (excuse the pun) out of conversations with Margie and inner child work (my younger sister had recommended the book by Stefanie Stahl, which is about accepting our ‘shadow child’ and thus freeing our ‘sunshine child’) and may call it 'Birthday' (also as a nod to one of my favourite paintings). 

Margie had asked me a while ago whether I had something symbolic that could represent the child in me, and while I searched I kept thinking of a blurry sepia photo of me on a beach that I had saved when my sister sent me a digital copy of it and that I had been meaning to use as the starting point for a painting. 

The book I mentioned in my last post, On Chapel Sands, starts with a girl – the author’s mother - disappearing from a beach, and the memoir is about where we come from, among other things. And incidentally, I just started swimming in the sea again last week.

The house my sisters and I spent the best part of our childhood in is being transformed into a home for my younger sister and her family, with an integrated apartment for our mum. I am so glad they will be under the same roof (the guilt of having left my tribe and moved to another country remains), but there must be something potent in the symbolism of the dismantling and rebuilding, as a lot of my dreams these last few weeks have been about home and a nostalgia for my childhood. Not being able to go to Germany at the moment comes into it as well, no doubt. There is a walk John and I like to go on here that, even though it is at the edge of wild dramatic windswept Connemara, has a softness that reminds me of the fields and ditches surrounding our village at home.

In a sense a lot of art is ultimately about the journey home; it is one of those archetypal themes that underpin pretty much everything. Yet I am still struck by how it is such a dominant thread in my reading and painting at the moment. 

John gave me the recently published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays about the physical homes of various artists, literary figures, composers, politicians, etc. and how they shaped their lives and work. And I bought (and have read the first few pages - then I put it away, as my currently-reading pile is about to topple) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling, about place and landscape, memory and grief. It also includes wild swimming.

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We watched two excellent documentaries that are available on Netflix at the moment. Becoming, about Michelle Obama’s memoir of the same title, which also has some moving scenes of her revisiting her childhood home and reminiscing about her late father, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a portrait of the iconic writer, created by her nephew. 

I realised recently that I had quite the collection of literary works dealing with grief and packed away some of them to donate, but I still have Didion’s exceptional memoirs about the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, and I want to reread them after watching the documentary.

A lot of my recommendations these days are the opposite of feel-good escapism*; between my choice of books and TV and the themes of my paintings (and the sea-swimming!), salt water is featuring heavily at the moment!

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* We are also watching After Life.

In the studio

Sibylle and Emil on Spiddal Beach

The finished painting

These days I am painting more than ever and finally finishing the book John and I are collaborating on. He says I tend to go from zero to 50 really quickly (the initial enthusiasm for a new project), then to 95 soon after, but then the remaining five per cent get dragged out. For me the last five per cent are usually a mixture of 'it's not as good as I wanted it to be and I need to start again' and frustration surrounding technical problems - I am self-taught in InDesign and Photoshop, and there are some gaps in my knowledge that are ultimately time-consuming and draining. I hasten to add that I do not procrastinate like this when there is an official deadline, so perhaps I have been too lax about working as part of a husband-and-wife team.

While I appreciate having a type-A high achiever by my side who always pushes me to do better and whose compliments often come with a flip side, I am proud of myself for having completed so many illustrations and paintings since my diagnosis. It has been therapeutic, and getting lost in something you are passionate about is the perfect antidote to scanxiety and worrying about the future.

Projects aside, the painting flows more easily now that I just paint whatever I feel like and have stopped worrying about themes and writing artist statements that could be straight from the arty bollocks website. It is so liberating, and the themes emerge after a while - I think I have always been drawn to the stream-of-consciousness approach to art-making.

I have been painting sea- and landscapes and family portraits and am working on a life-size (!) self-portrait, in the largest format I have ever worked in. To balance it out I am also painting mini canvases of nature studies.

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I am watching The Durrells on Netflix. It is wonderfully escapist, and I only regret not having read the books first - they are on my list. My sister is also a fan, and as a seamstress extraordinaire she has been inspired by Louisa Durrell's wardrobe, in all its high-waisted 1930s glory. It is a pleasure seeing her latest creations whenever we meet up.