[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Be
sure to visit the
Letter from Joyce Archives
Look for the February 2004 release of The Usual Rules in paperback!
April 7, 2004
Dear Friends,
I’ve
written here, before, about my father, Max Maynard, but the events of
last weekend inspire me to tell his story here again.
My father earned a living, for all the years of my growing up, as a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, but every night, he climbed the stairs to our attic and made art, and every morning, when I came downstairs for breakfast, I’d find him poring over reproductions in art books. I have never known a person to possess a greater passion for painting, or a purer love of making art. I have seen my father weep, at a painting, he was so moved by what he saw. And I have seen him rage at art, too.
His feeling for the visual world was never confined to the kinds of images contained within a picture frame. One of my clearest images of my father is of him standing, frozen, on a dirt road somewhere in the country, on one of the walks we took, every Saturday morning, studying the particular angle of a tree stump, against the green of moss behind it, or the way the light hit a stone bed along the bay, or the roof of an abandoned and falling-down barn, and the snow fence behind it. My father was a lover of the outdoors -- trees,in particular -- and though he drew human figures with dazzling skill, his paintings were mostly partially abstracted landscapes -- sometimes British Columbia, sometimes New Hampshire, usually with a faint quality of desolation to them, but beauty too, and something else: an unmistakable sense of joy, in the painting of them.
All his life, my father carried a drawing implement with him, and a sketchbook, or -- when he didn’t have one -- three by five note cards. Where other people’s fathers took them skiing, or to a ball game, or the mall, my father took me sketching, and afterwards, at home, we talked about line, and color, and form, the way, in other families, parents might have educated their children about something like the stock market, or interesting football plays. I didn’t become a painter myself, but the love of making art has stayed with me all my life (and it’s one my children share.) Put me alone in a room for an hour, with nothing to entertain me, and if I have a pen and paper, I’ll be happy. (I find myself thinking, here, of a friend of mine who told me the story once of how, as a very young boy -- filled with longing and curiousity about the opposite sex -- he had once drawn two primitive circles on the side of a barn, meant to represent a pair of breasts, with a dot in the center of each of them. And of how, just the sight of his own drawing, had then inflamed the seven year old he was, at the time. There's a testimony for you, to the power of making art, and art becoming, for the artist, its own reality.)
My father was also an alcoholic -- a man tormented by old guilts and losses, and the wild frustration he felt as a painter, whose work remained unseen by anyone but his wife and daughters. For him, beauty was as real an ideal as money might be, to someone else. My sister and I both remember the mortification of having our father (not wholly sober) greet some friend or (occasionally) boyfriend at our door with a wild look in his eye and the opening question, "Tell me, man…. What is your definition of Beauty?"
Our parents’ marriage was rocky, for years, and when he turned seventy, they parted. His life seemed to spin out of control for a while, after that -- bad health, no money, advanced alcoholism. But at the age of seventy six, he made the surprising and brave decision to move back to the west coast of Canada, where he’d lived as a young painter -- bringing with him virtually nothing but a few beloved books, a single suitcase of clothing (he favored plaid pants and ascots) and his lifetime’s collection of unsold paintings.
All the relatives of his generation of the family with whom he’d mostly lost touch were long dead by this point, but a great nephew who worked for the provincial archives met his plane, and agreed to store the paintings for him. When he opened the crates, he says, he was amazed quantity of the work -- and more so, of its quality. He brought a few examples to a gallery in Victoria, and within a short time, an exhibition of my father’s paintings was arranged. The first in fifty years.
My father lived just four more years after that. Never completely sober (though beloved by his AA compatriots), he continued to draw and paint right to the end of his life, even when arthritis had left his fingers so twisted it was difficult just holding a paintbrush. He died in 1982, the year my son Charlie (a painter himself, now) was born. After his death, cleaning out his room in the old folks’ residential hotel where he lived at the end, we found a thick sheaf of drawings he’d made, in the final weeks of his life, when he could no longer take the walks he loved, or go sketching. They are drawings made, in the dining room of the hotel, of figures in wheelchairs, mostly. In the absence of drawing paper, my father drew them on the paper placemats.
This
past December would have marked my father’s 100th birthday. To celebrate,
the gallery that represents his work, in Victoria, mounted a retrospective
show of his paintings and drawings. This past weekend was the opening
of the show, and my sister and I -- also her son, and my youngest son,
Will -- travelled to Victoria, to be there.
For me, it is a deeply moving thing, to walk into a room of my father’s paintings and to feel, as I do, (even now, 22 years after his death) the power of his presence. Many of the paintings in the show were ones I remembered seeing him painting, in his little attic studio, late into the night -- calling me up (at age seven, or eight) to show me (after first, placing a mat around the work, with exquisite precision) and listening to what I had to say with as much seriousness as he would have given an art dealer or a buyer with his pockets stuffed with dollar bills. There in that gallery room, last Sunday, I saw New Hampshire roads I’d walked along with my father as a child, and British Columbia coastline, and even, in one of the paintings, the image of two figures I always imagined to be my father, my mother and me, off on a sketching trip, walking along a snow fence.
My son Will never met his grandfather, who died two years before his birth, but he looks a great deal like him. I loved it, that he was there at the show, and wearing a good suit, as my father -- a natty dresser to the end -- would have appreciated. My sister and I have had some uneasy times in our relationship over the years, but for us, too, there was a coming together, over the art work, and our mutual understanding -- something no one else in that room could know, quite as the two of us did -- of what it meant to our father, to be a painter, what it represented, to make this art, that people still study and talk about, two full decades after h is death, and for much longer too, no doubt.
The
next morning, my son and I walked over to the Provincial archives, and
(with special gloves on) leafed slowly through the pages of sketchbooks
of my dad’s, dated as early as 1923. Then we got a cup of coffee,
and headed back to the airport. My father didn’t leave me –or
my children -- the conventional kind of legacy some people end up with.
But I felt rich, in art.
(If you’d like to see some of the images of Max Maynard’s show, check out Winchester Galleries' website. My favorite painting by my dad, perhaps -- and a rare example of a portrait by him -- can be seen illustrating an essay I wrote and broadcast a few years ago, on NPR, titled My Father Was a Painter.
Finally -- in other news -- I wanted to let you know that the first Tarts for John event, held at my home on Sunday, April 4, was so much of a success that many more events are now in the works, in which I plan to drop in on the kitchens of my fellow Americans, who are interested in seeing someone other than our current president, occupying the Oval Office. I'm happy to report that I've been hearing from men and women around the country (OK, I'll be honest. Women. But there's no reason why men shouldn't start baking too) who are hosting similar events, or coming up with their own ways of raising money for the Kerry campaign. As always, I hope you'll feel free to share your thoughts and ideas here on the discussion forum. (and stay tuned for more news).
RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND
