Four Portraits + Violet, A Story in Words and Pictures
by Deborah Stein
Deborah Stein, Vibrant Matter, watercolor, coffee, tea on paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Four Portraits + VioleT
DEBORAH STEIN | APR 2024 | Issue 32
"I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.”
–Marge Piercy from To Be of Use
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.
Although 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, killed in ghettos and camps, ancestors I’d never meet except in my writing, my laments, ancestors who were not even sentences ever uttered before my mother died, yet they haunted me, were haunting my imagination, all of this, including the flowers, became unruly things.
I thought painting flowers was a break from feeling through the air to figure out who or what has grown me, who or what was growing in me, and how and where I might establish roots in the aftermath, to grow myself from here. I wrote to the flowers and they became portraits. I wrote portraits to the holiday huts, and maybe to all the women I’ve ever known, to my dead mother, all my dead ancestors, you, me, or maybe just themselves, all who have ever been flowers.
The flowers have their own lives now.
Maybe these became studies, where persona and person and flowers and women meet to give us inklings to perhaps a very old story. Ultimately what I found was that my writing life and my painting life and these ancestor ghosts do what they want—they know me better than I know me. When I try to steer either too hard it becomes unmanageable for us all. I try just to let the writing and the painting speak to one another, develop a relationship outside my meddling. The intention for these seems only to come from my anthers and it's only after we get sticky is there the possibility that we can all keep going. — Deborah Stein, April 2024.
Deborah Stein, Every Flower, A Universe, handmade watercolor, amaranth ink, white peony tea on paper 5 x 8 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Rose gingerly moonwalked backwards and stepped into her car, rolled it politely backwards and screeched into a powerful forward drive that was, without doubt, impressive.
Salvia considered that she might be wrong about Rose, wrong all along.
Deborah Stein, Spring Constellation, Shooting Star, watercolor, gouache, tea with Atlantic Ocean Water on Paper, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Tulip
Tulip, upon stopping in for a tire rotation, sat down in the thin waiting room, breathing in smells that made her wonder.
She came in hopes of understanding what it was to live in the world.
The row of chairs in the room revealed so much she thought, and there she dreamed about where she might drive with her newly rotated tires. Maybe only to the market next and not the four thousand miles across the great expanse of the continent upon which were ancient trails, maybe a thousand years old, maybe one hundred thousand years old, paved over now for her Honda Accord she’d bought used from a dealer in Petaluma. She wondered what it will be like when the car breaks down, when she runs out of gas and how nice it will be to walk until August.
When a young man came to her, he stood right above her as she lay on the floor in the waiting room, bending down gently near her blushing cheek to say, “your car is ready ma’am.” She sat up with very little effort and looking straight into his sparkling seagull eyes, took his hands in hers, closed them over the keys he held, the key to the car, the key to the house, and spoke softly, firmly, so his warm hand felt hers, the words, “you keep these, for I will walk,” scrolling right past them both.
Deborah Stein, Second Bodies in Ursa Major, watercolor, gouache and tea on paper, 5 x 8 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Zinnia
Zinnia hadn’t much time before her partner flew in from the coast and so washed the dishes, fed the horse and the chickens, made the beds, watered the children, swept the cement floors, thought about vacuuming but instead shook out the rugs and left them to dry in the sandstorm, lifted the snakes off the driveway pebbles to make way for the truckloads of oyster shells crushed under the weight of a heavy god, stopped to smile to whoever blew through the church lot, hired the entertainment—a drag queen named Hedda Let Us and a flutist named Ray, singed her straight hair into tight curls, strapped herself into a bodice, donned a many-layered petticoat, made clams stuffed with the dry Portuguese sausage famous for its local flair, made sugar water for the hummingbirds, released the white dove sprayed for flies swatted mosquitoes checked for misgivings found her past set the house ablaze, and set out for the two day drive to the airport.
Deborah Stein, Hydra, watercolor and gouache, Rio Grande Water on paper, 5 x 8 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Dahlia
Dahlia isn’t sure anymore about being called Dolly, although she isn’t sure about being called by any other name either. She thinks maybe “Cactus” or “Button-up Blouse” or “Big Girl” could be good, but in the end she’ll stick with Dolly, which is what most people call her. Perhaps it is because she seems like a Dolly, the way she often rolls past a crowd, or is thrown away eventually.
Often she reminds herself to straighten her stance, not necessarily to be more like a Dahlia, but because she has lately been favoring her right side and her posture has become tilted immensely toward the river. The steep walk has hunched her, perhaps it is her focus on every pebble she comes across, picks up and carries along with her in her tin of pencils in an old parfleche she stole from the museum.
She is tearing bits of the old bread she brings along, tearing to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind her in hopes someone will search for her. She walks along the hot road thinking about how hot it is and how much she enjoys taking the air, hot air or cold. Maybe she really was just lazy before, as her mother pointed out when she left home to go away as her father had asked of her. Now she has been by herself, sometimes there are others, and maybe she was beautiful now, no one knew.
In the end and due to a concerted effort by everyone in her body, she walks so much slower and tries so much harder. She is patient now. No one can stop her now. She sharpens her pencils with each line she draws. Now she’s creating lines that are as close together as she likes: she’s created clamshells, dandelions, house shingles, grass, the list goes on.
Deborah Stein, Puffball Waiting for Wind, ink, watercolor and gouache on paper, 7 x 10 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Violet
Violet had a tattoo, among other tattoos, just above her beautiful knee that no one else could read unless your head was upside down or you were smaller, but if someone asked her, “What’s your tattoo say?” she’d smile sweetly and be happy to answer “Oh,” she’d look down, “it's a Cure song.”
Violet would then unfurl her hands down the length of her leg, and look down a bit longer at her beautiful knee. “I got it with my best friend Dale,” she continued. “Dale has the same one above his beautiful knee. It’s his other knee though, amongst his other many tattoos: sea creatures and mermaids, a bat, an umbrella, a tooth, a ship’s wheel, a murder of crows, a whale, a shadow, an ancient headstone, the Hebrew word traif, a fir needle, a book of hymns, a memory of children’s dreams, a house with green trim, a forest floor, an ocean, a lady slipper, a violet.”
I heard a song and turned away
As piece by piece you performed your story
Noiselessly across the floor
Dancing at the funeral party*
“It’s a slow song,” she tells whoever is still listening.
Violet closed her eyes to the glaring sun just then, taking a sip from her beer can, swaying all her pale violet until she vanished, the sun’s glow ate her up, her lips the color of her tattoo, a greenish black, a blackish green, a slow song.
Deborah Stein, Rhythm of an Ancient Thing, Watercolor, amaranth Ink, gouache, pencil on paper, 6 x 8 inches, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
*The Funeral Party,” song by The Cure, songwriters: Laurence Andrew Tolhurst / Robert James Smith / Simon Gallup, 1981.
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.