A summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13.

There was a particular happiness, or at least so it seems only in retrospect, to the summer of 2008. It was my second summer after my mother died so my grief and loneliness were not quite as intense as the year before. I had spent almost all my summers since the age of twenty in Provincetown with my mother in the house she bought in late 1969, with my sister Naomi staying for shorter periods, writing upstairs at the table I am writing on now and also using the house to work when we weren’t here.  My mother Resia worked at a little jeweler’s table downstairs, in the room with the boiler in it, I worked upstairs in a room partially under the eaves, with seashell wallpaper from the ’50s (installed by the previous owner–as modernist New Yorkers we wouldn’t have been caught dead putting up patterned wall paper but I’m crazy about this pattern and how it interacts with the paintings). We had lunch and dinner together, over the years the task of cooking passing from mother to daughter. A  strange arrangement perhaps, by common standards of what a woman’s life is supposed to be–sometimes with some trepidation an image would pass through my mind, of the town librarian during my childhood who had a grown daughter who was always with her, who was not quite right–but the arrangement suited me because it suited my work and I always felt a strong sense of pride at this image of two generations of women engaged in creative work in one dear old house. An adjustment had to be made to the aloneness in that space and painting helped.

The summer of 2008 I continued work where the “object matter” was the empty thought balloon, sometimes a head, sometimes a cloud, but a particularly liberating space to just “paint paint.” This was my studio wall photographed the morning of July 15, 2008.

July 15, 2012

In keeping perhaps with the theme of mother and daughter, and what traditional female roles are as they affect the identity of an artist, this drawing from last summer was spurred by a funny thought that brought the image to my head, of the signifiers of female youth–perky breasts and bleeding cunt– as attachments that could be detached or aimed as weapons: it was part of some scenario I thought would be funny, but once I visualized it the thought vanished. However it is part of a fascination I’ve had since my early twenties with the notion of femininity, which I understood as a role or costume that a woman could put on or take off.

Mira Schor, Tit Doxa, July 15, 2012. Ink on tracing paper, c. 18 x 30 in.