Amanda van Scoyoc

Painting of Darius Poteat

I started this painting of Darius a month after he was gone. I painted it mainly for Eli, but also because I thought that staring at his face while placing paint on a canvas might be healing. It also just seemed like Darius deserved a portrait, and he deserved to be surrounded by blue skies, leaves, and those weird orange spikey flowers that bloom in July and August in North Carolina.

Sometimes, while painting, I would think about how strange it is that this is as old as Darius will ever be. When I paint Eli or me, I imagine being old, looking back on the painting, and exclaiming to Eli, “look how young we were.” But with Darius, this is how old he will be forever. The painting is the same as the memory.

These last few days have been very difficult. I have hardly wanted to leave the apartment and it’s made me nearly hate it here. It wasn’t good timing to move here when we did. If we had stayed in Durham maybe Darius would have stayed on our couch. If Eli hadn’t just started working his new job he would have gone over earlier in the day. I feel like this moment in time, all these changes were more significant than we realized, and the world is out of control. 

As a kid I always used to think about all of the decisions that we make in life and how they define our life path. Just as the brain’s neurons are constantly changing how we experience the world, each small moment changes every moment of our future. And some small decisions can change everything. It’s too much to think about all that could have been, and I had stopped thinking about it as an adult. But since Darius left us, I just can’t stop thinking about all of the tiny decisions that could have changed this outcome. I’m stuck on the question of inevitability. Was this suicide inevitable. If it had been stopped, would he have succeeded in the end.

Darius’s death has made me feel both out of control and in awe of this world. When I wake up in the morning, I stare at Eli knowing exactly how much I could loose. I’m amazed by how much we humans are capable of feeling. Having talked to so many people, it’s comforting to know that there are expectations of grief. This feeling of being really depressed about 40% of the time and callus about 60% of the time… sometimes feeling that everything is OK and thinking that I’m inhuman and have no emotions and then suddenly breaking apart into sadness… this is the path that grief plows. I saw Maya Angelo speak a few years ago and she said in her singing voice that in life you can always take comfort in knowing that everything you experience, every emotion you feel has been felt before. We are built of common threads. Grief is personal, but every thought, every feeling is a part of grief’s repertoire.

Today has been a better day. Today I painted some small paintings of Darius for Eli. I had been planning this for the past couple of days, but didn’t have the momentum. Today I did.

 

Darius Poteat

Darius Poteat

This weekend I created a painting based on a few of the photos I took during Andrea’s birth. The picture of the painting is fuzzy because it’s about to storm and there isn’t enough light in our apartment to take a decent photo.

After finishing the painting of Damaris in her bedroom last weekend, I realized that I did not like the straight forwardness of the painting. Although the painting is in no way a reproduction of the photograph that Damaris took, it did not say anything that was not said in the photograph.

I called one of my closest friends and fellow painter, Alex Freeman, and asked him for advice on how to make the paintings about teen pregnancy move further away from reproduction (although still basing the paintings on photographs taken by the young women.) He brought up the fact that ever since I was fifteen, we’ve watched each other grow artistically for that long, I have always included personal symbolism in my paintings. They have always included symbols that show how I am experiencing the world that I reproducing, so that the paintings become as much about my experience of the subject matter as they are about the subject itself. I realized when he told me this, that my journal is still rich with such symbolism and interpretation but the paintings are not.

I decided to sit down and work on a painting based on the same photo I used for the last painting. This one is more in the style of my “bathtub” series that I worked on all last year- combining images from photographs and symbols that enter my journal.

I had scribbled into my journal
“Fetus in a womb like adult in a bathtub. Child in a bathtub like adult in the world. Pregnant Teenager?” I decided to move forward from there and work in some of the symbolism I’d developed in my journal. I also decided to use gel medium (a clear acrylic primer) to prepare the birch wood for painting on so that the wood could remain the background of the painting. Here is my experimental painting.

This weekend I am taking a break from from photography and working on a couple of paintings.

I’ve uploaded into the portfolio section some photos of the first healthy families portrait I’ve been working on this afternoon. I worked from a Polaroid snapshot the girls fiance took of her against the shower curtain in their bathroom. I gave her a Polaroid camera and a pack of film to take home and bring back this week, and I just love the photo of her against the curtain. She is wearing a pink shirt with white hearts and behind her are lilly pads. It is very surreal. I like her stoic expression mixed with the youthfulness of her clothes and the patterns. I’m going to work back into the painting tomorrow, bringing out better flesh tones and reworking the paint after it has dried a bit.

In early October I had pneumonia and was out of work for a week and a half. In that time I was very frustrated because I felt I had just started forming relationships and getting into the swing of things at Roca, and then I was stuck at home with a high fever and a stack of movies.

I found out that the Massachusets Arts Grants applications were due on the 15th, so from my home I helped Roca write a grant asking for money to create a program based on Wendy Ewalds book *I Wanna Take Me a Picture*. Although writing grants is not my favorite past time, we got the grant in on time and it was a great way for me to distill my ideas and have lots of conversations at Roca about the kinds of interactive photography programs that I want to be a part of. Since sending in that grant, we have picked out the students who will be involved, and as soon as I get together lesson plans, a list of supplies, and hopefully access to a dark room, we should be on our way.

I also wrote a personal grant to the Somerville Arts Council for creating paintings based on the writings of the pregnant teenagers and young mothers that I am working with at Roca. I am excited about the possibilities of this project- these women stand apart in their youth and maturity. These women confide in each other about topics most teenagers don’t think about. At times they make me feel very young. I took a walk with one of them the other day and we talked about boyfriends. After she found out I had been in a relationship for a year, she asked me if I was going to have children soon. I told her I was not ready yet and then wondered at my answer. She is a teenager and completely ready to have her baby.

Here is a section of the personal grant that explains the painting aspect of the project.

“In Chelsea, I have been visiting with a group of pregnant teens and young mothers through Roca, a nonprofit invested in keeping young people in school and off the streets. The first time I met with the young mothers group, I asked them what message they would want to send to the world outside of Chelsea. They told me that they want people to know motherhood is a common experience no matter if you give birth at 12 or 30. Even though they are young, they have experienced the same changes of pregnancy and motherhood. They listed some of the problems for me: hormones raging, cravings, sickness, pain, growth, birth, never having enough time, stress, aloneness, and daddy problems. They meet together at Roca to relay stories and lend support, but outside of this close group of friends their voices are not heard. Some of them have a difficult time making friends at school. Some of them feel that people label them as too inexperienced and young to be mothers.

“Together we tried to come up with a way to explore the aspects of motherhood that are the same for all mothers. Roca has given them journals, and together we have come up with different writing prompts. For example, after much discussion it became clear that one of the similar experiences they had shared is that each one of them had vivid dreams about their unborn child during their pregnancy. Each of them could remember in detail these dreams filled with hopes and fears. I would like to use their stories as the basis of a series of paintings that explore teen pregnancy through the eyes of the mother. I will create paintings in my Somerville apartment/studio based on their writings and based on working with each girl to design her own unique portrait. I will then pair these paintings with excerpts of their writings about the things that are common to all mothers. The only identifying information will be their age and the age of their child. The girls are excited to be a part of the creative process of designing paintings, and they like the idea of having a painting of them that will not reveal their physical identity the way a photograph would.”

I like the idea of being accountable to them each week. I tend to be very secretive about my paintings- this year I want to bring my work to a new level and I have decided that to do that I need their help. I like that they will bring something to the meetings and I will have to bring something as well. I like that we each have something very different to offer the other. I hope that combining different kinds of artwork based around the same topic will allow us to feed off of each others creativity.

Liisa recomended the book *The Youngest Parents* by Robert Coles. I have been reading it on my way to and from work and am very impressed by it. My one worry is that by expanding this young mothers project beyond a photography and writing project into something more like a collection of written, drawn, painted or photographed information, I may lose the power of the information.