the high priestess

I moved to New York in the autumn of 1992, when I was 23.

I understood about myself that whatever it was I ended up doing with my life, it would be something creative, and New York seemed like a good place to be a creative.

Although I can’t say that I moved to the city with a plan for being a working artist, when I closed my eyes and envisioned my new life, I saw myself living in a loft apartment making paintings or developing performance art pieces.

This did not come to pass.

I lived in several different apartments during my New York years, none of them a loft with big windows. I did go to a party once in a downtown loft apartment that looked strikingly like the one of my imagination. I can’t remember who lived in this apartment or what this person did for a living.

I did things for a living like answer telephones, stuff envelopes, and sort fabric swatches until I got a “real” job at a private elementary school.

In those early New York years, the art I made was small in scale. I made weird ink drawings, scratched up Polaroids, artist books, and altered photographs with text panels. I had work in a juried show that was curated by Duane Michaels and a group show at an arts center in Brooklyn.

And then, I stopped making art.

The story of what happened to me, my life, my art-making is a deep and convoluted story, but the point is that I stopped.

I stopped engaging my creativity through visual work.

In many ways, I stopped living.

I floated away from myself like an astronaut floating weightless in space, still connected to her spacecraft by a silver cord, but completely disoriented and so far away from gravity.

I became a person who lay on her kitchen floor unable to muster the energy to walk two blocks to the grocery store.

But nothing stays the same.

Life is always in motion and eventually, I began to write again.

I joined a group called Brooklyn Writers and started to slowly come back to life.

I moved to the suburbs and went back to school.

While working toward my MFA in fiction writing, I took a printmaking class.

I remembered what it felt like to work visually.

I wasn’t good at pulling prints, but I loved that class.

I loved my two years in graduate school.

There is much about my life that I regret and many things I would do differently if I had the chance.

If I could go back in time, I would save myself from myself.

But I can not.

What I can do, however, is remember that amid the wrong turns and poor choices, I did experience moments of beauty in my twenties.

I think of the first time I walked in to Caffe Reggio, walking past the Chelsea Hotel, sitting in Washington Square Park, shopping in the East Village, the street fairs where I bought $10 dresses.

New York City - at least the New York City of the nineties - is a part of me.

Still, when I talk about having deep regret, it is usually my twenties I am talking about.

I regret the self-hatred that clouded my vision and held me apart from experience.

I regret that I did not listen to myself or trust my intuition.

I regret that I deferred to the opinions of others, that I allowed others to tell me who I was.

I was given a golden opportunity that I squandered, and I will perhaps never feel peaceful about that.

I don’t think it’s necessary that we feel peaceful about every aspect of our lives, by the way.

I don’t think the goal of life is to have neutral emotions or exclusively “positive” emotions.

Life is messy and as painful as it is beautiful.

So when I say that creating this painting was healing for me, I don’t mean that it wiped me clean of all wounds or entanglement.

It was a journey into memory; it was soul retrieval.

The High Priestess is a departure.

It’s much larger than the canvases I have been painting on and thematically it’s a change.

It’s deeply autobiographical…it’s different.

It’s a reclaiming.

It called me back into the territory of my former art-making life.

I picked up a thread I dropped a long time ago.

Perhaps I stepped back into the skin of the undergraduate who loved the art building at night, when no one else was there, who felt a passion for making art because to make art was to tell the truth.

The healing process that I experienced in creating this painting, was healing in the true since of the word - it was a wholeness, of calling back lost parts of myself, of integrating stray pieces of my story back into my heart.

It was difficult to approach.

I had to push through it, fight the urge to gesso over the entire canvas and fall back asleep to it.

I had to allow this painting to be and allow it to pull me forward.

It did pull me forward, through some sort of energy gateway.

I don’t know what, if anything it will mean to its viewers.

Maybe something completely different, maybe nothing.

It is.

It exists.

And so do I.