“Both my siblings were born in Saalfeld, our mothers home, I was born in Nordhausen/Harz (the legend goes that there is a mountain where witches were burned in the Middle Ages)”
This is a line from my mother’s memoirs.
Nine years ago, my mother was diagnosed with having an aneurysm in her brain. She believed it was going to burst at any moment and that she was going to die. My mother is terrified of death. So, to take her mind off of her condition, I had her write her memoirs for me. I would have to read it in its entirety to remember what she highlighted about her Nazi father, he domineering mother, her sadistic Hitler-youth older brother, and her troubled younger sister who chronically ran away from home. But the line above—the line where my mother cites her birthplace at the base of a witch-mountain-grave always struck me.
Probably because there is and has always been something witchy about my mother.
She has premonitions. She knows things. She feels things. She is mean. She is violent. She was sexual and seductive well into her 40’s and 50’s. She surrounded herself with laughing women and booze. And many men.
She was powerful.
After spending sometime reconstituting images from my childhood photo album (images of my childhood that were weighted by the shadow of my mother), I decided to begin working on this project using photographs of my mother in her youth.
Thematically, I am running with the connection between my mother and witches.
As a student of literature, the idea of witches brings to mind s variety of passages and images.
Circe and Odysseus’ men tuned to pigs.
Young women levitating and dancing with the devil in Arthur Miller’s Crucible.
A few things will be different between this project (my mother’s photographs) and the previous (my childhood photographs)
Technically I am making them differently. For my childhood photos, I painted the photographs as though I were painting a portrait: I looked and replicated on canvas to the best of my ability. For my mother’s photographs, I want to rely less on my eye and focus my energies on storytelling, interpretation, and reconstitution so I am tracing the images from my laptop onto tracing paper, running lead over the opposite side, and then transferring the image to canvas by retracing (with whatever alterations I nee to make).
The color is different also. My childhood painting were heavy and I wanted to weigh them down by painting over a gray base, washing out the color. With my mother’s photographs (though they are older and in black and white), I am being more crisp, more vibrant, more exact.
Because this is the witch in her prime. Dancing with the devil. The witch pre and post World War II. Before she began losing her power to the American dream and to cheating and to violent men.
