What We Pass Down

My mother made some of her art for cathedrals when she was a young artist taking commissioned work. Stained glass, bronze castings, and woodcuts were her media then for her days as a liturgical artist. Light passing through color and glass, hard blocks of wood cut with super sharp tools, all telling biblical stories to people who’d see her work and never know who she was. She trained for her artistry properly, in Chicago, in the 1940s, back when a woman going to art school was its own small act of nerve. Then, she gave it up to raise ten children (or put it down, set it aside, or however you want to describe what happens when a life that big needs both hands).

a woodcut book my mother made

I always loved art, and watching her make it, but never practiced it much, not like now anyway, when I can’t stop painting. These days, I am spending time painting wedding invitations, watercoloring menus, fashioning wire and twine as a way of exploring the best display for guests to find their seat. There is always a sketch, maybe some glue, and usually watercolor for quick sketches. I know that these programs, postcards, and menus will be swept away at the end of the night or folded into purses and forgotten by the band’s first song. But I am very clear, the joy I get in doing this, far outweighs any compliment that someone might give.

For both of my kids’ impending weddings this year, I got to paint Save-the-Dates - first haphazardly, then with a bit more intention and success. There were many we loved by the end, and by the time I painted an oil for Hannah’s shower gift, I could almost think it was decent, and that my mother would actually like it. That’s how it is as artists - we are never quite good enough, always learning, always improving, and always self critical. That painting I made for her deserves a partner, and I have been mulling the subject and light for weeks now. Luckily, no one will know how much time I am spending thinking about it.

It is the same process my mother had, it simply has shifted from her own oil, watercolor or woodcut process, to my post consumer content pieces of paper that are serving as a guideline for an event. Both are examples of art we made, for people we love. And what a joy it is when I make a swift and confident mark to see my mother’s stroke in my own. I know she is there in the art.

a spread in her book, the retelling of The Dragon of the Sea

My mother died when my children were toddlers. They don’t really remember her, but they grew up with me and my sisters referring to this creative force their whole lives. Sure, her art work has always been around our house, but she is more a mythical character to them - like some ancient grandmother known for feeding armies of children and enduring the public school system with constant art cuts, and making frequent miracles happen as if she were a central figure in the loaves and fishes story.

They know I am who I am because of her, and they, in part, are who they are because of us. They are young enough that what they remember of her isn’t memory really, it’s more like inheritance. She never got to see who they became - Hannah, the writer, actor, producer, and a soprano good enough to make a room go quiet. She is a creative force the way some people are simply, unmistakably a certain height. Her brother, Will, is a different form of creative. He is entrepreneurial, can get bored easily and can be impulsive and impatient, also like me. He is confident, passionate, a self-starter, and self learner. Luckily, my husband’s humility and diplomacy covers all of us like a table cloth just back from the cleaners. We all know the tropes about creatives being scattered and messy. We’re that and more.

I am grateful that both of my kids have the creative daring that reminds me of my grandparents parents coming through Ellis Island during the Great Famine in Ireland. Leaving one’s home country is one of the biggest acts of courage and creativity I can imagine. Picturing what it will be like, imagining new family, friends, jobs and livelihoods. Starting over with nothing but the shirt on your back. Creativity, it turns out, is all around us - in our kitchens, our gardens, our sewing machines and in our church basements. When the early immigrants came, it was true survivor - tribes and all, in real life, surviving, and thriving - without reality TV.

This is what we do with generational inheritance - grandparents to parents to children and grandchildren. We hand down the ritual, not the résumé. My mother handed me a window into her woodcut process on the weekends when I watched her for hours, afraid her hand would slip and ruin both the piece and her own skin. I have handed down to my own children, something less holy and, I’d argue, no less sacred: cooking fast and a little messy, hosting large gatherings for friends and family, displaying our art all over the house, even in frames that don’t match, and the conviction that imperfect and joyful are better than careful and correct every time. I have never been much of a tidy cook, gardener, hostess, or seamstress. I am definitely not a tidy artist. I am not a planner, to be generous, and definitely would say my life falls into spontaneous living, if that even is a category. My kids, for better or worse, have followed in my footsteps.

They are both, this year, mildly frantic about a hundred details most people never think about until they’re the one holding all the threads. Hannah has strong opinions about colors, Will likes a modern aesthetic. Hannah hates the idea of anything matching, while Will and his fiance’s palette is finely throughout wedding decor. The thing that matters, as we all know, is that they are mad for their partners as I was for mine 33 years ago. Lucky for me, they are not heading off to Asia right after their wedding, as I did, not to come home for five years with them as babies in tow.

What mattered then is what matters now. Dan and I set off a few weeks after our wedding to live in Macau, Hong and China with great enthusiasm. Just like us, our kids are stepping into a life with their person - everything else is set dressing, and set dressing is exactly the kind of thing our family has always been willing to get a little wrong in service of getting the real thing right.

I don’t know what Will and Hannah will pass down to their kids. Maybe it won’t be anything that looks like art at all — maybe it’ll be a way of directing a room, running a campaign, hitting a note, or creating a national program that will be remembered 40 years from now. Either way, they know their crafts well enough to know which detail to let go of at eleven o’clock the night before a thing launches. But I’d bet money they will live lives rich in ritual, not résumés. That’s the only inheritance that survives being put down for thirty years and picked back up again. That’s the only inheritance that skips a generation and lands anyway, with two grandchildren who never got to really know the artist they came from.

My mother built things out of light and glass so that people would look up at the stained glass windows. I’m building things out of watercolor and card stock so that my kids will look back, someday, and know exactly what was being said, underneath all of it, the whole time.

Making art for others is the thing that says, “I love you. I made this with my hands. Now go into the world and take the memory with you.”

MJ