Notes on Possibly Dreaming Ways Home

And when is a painting--or anything ever finished? Secrets revealed...

May 04, 2023

Notes on Possibly Dreaming Ways Home, Deborah Stein 1/2023

In January I was in a town called Tepoztlán, Mexico and I made this painting in a room under a volcano while in residency there for a month. This, which sounds like a romantic thing to say, wasn’t as totally romantic as it sounds, except for the flora and the rabbits, the explosions too close to sounding like bombs which shook us all day and night, and meeting many brilliant Latin American and North American writers, making new friends, and basically, mostly, walking everywhere on steep igneous cobblestones, being really really alone under a volcano.

I don’t know if this painting here is finished or if I am asking this question because my Pinocchio, above, is eyeless. He is clearly reaching for air so he may make his way through, un-obstacled, or maybe he is feeling it for the obstacles themselves that might block his way. What is he looking for? His babbo, his home. If you know the story, you know that after so many mishandled deals with The Fox and The Cat and that Donkey Salesman, so many silly decisions and not-listenings to his babbo, his beautiful Little Fairy with the Turquoise Hair and her nurse-maid The Snail, something in him learned. Something shifted in him about something called love, the love thing, the longing for the strange thing his babbo was also feeling somewhere in the belly of a something not quite a whale and not quite a shark.

The longing of belonging to a someone wrapped its invisible sticky arms tight around Pinocchio’s, the son’s irresponsible yet playful and childlike heart and made it sticky with worry—what was the worry? Something about never having a place to belong again. Something about wanting the place back where he belonged and what if he can never find it again? What then? What is that that that he cannot see and can barely name that has him a walking wandering lost and sticky heart.

Perhaps that has been the feeling I’d been feeling many times, certainly that time I was really quite alone when I went to write and paint at a residency with 50 other writers in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Someone who had run, misunderstood what it all was and so lost my way before I caught myself. Someone who belonged to no one. Now we’ve, my husband and I lost the last of our parental figures, and are very much feeling our way through the air for who we belong to. And how do we do this next iteration of a life without the belonging…yes. That’s it. Like a puppet come to life, finding our way around our new selves, as though the old ones never existed, hoping the new ones will exist somewhere in all of this air.

another unfinished painting, Deborah Stein 1/2023

This is what I love about painting. It reveals secrets to me about me that I know but also don’t know. It untethers my blind spots in all the sexy ways. The painting begs my writing to speak to it and this conversation happens only when I get to the table.

I am teaching a class in a few weeks, Watercolor for Writers. The conversation for painters is “how do I know if it’s finished?” What is the answer for writers?

In a course with the great and totally inspiring Henrik Drescher, I was stunned to hear the answer to “when is a work of art finished?” He said, “A work of art is finished when it’s sold, printed or destroyed.” I cannot love this enough. But that isn’t the same for writing. For me writing is finished when I feel like the circle has been drawn around myself. The painting question I’m still working on. How anything knows when anything else is done when it lingers like a ghost on the insides and on the out is the question for which one person will say, “Well, it’s simple! You feel it!” and one person will say, “Its a mystery. When you find out, let me know.”

And even if these paintings above aren't finished— because the eyes can’t seem to make their arrival on them— I kept thinking about how, when I paint breathing things like this wooden puppet I’m stuck with, I often place the pupils in the eyes lastly. This, since a trip to Ladakh in the late 90s and a chance stay with a temple Thangka painter named Norbu. I sat with him in a cherry orchard during a very short summer and I painted and he painted. I didn’t go to learn anything but he showed me how he breathed life into the body of his Buddhas and Boddisatvas through a paintbrush held with his teeth, between his lips, blowing life into each perfectly placed pupil, eyes looking not at you but into you.

unfinished, Deborah Stein 1/2023

I posted this unfinished, unsold, unprinted, undestroyed work on instagram and wrote on February 14th, 2023, below, which then inspired a different writer to write her way home. I’m not sure how I feel about my title being used as her title but it really is nice to inspire someone. I suppose the painting is considered finished now.

By me: “Notes on possibly dreaming my way home.”

My Pinocchio is sightless but still has a few other senses he can depend on.

I was writing more than painting and now I’m painting more than writing, or just writing less than I was in January. I’m listening to whatever I’ve been trying to tell myself since the year began. My own personal sense of time is moving further from flowers and firmly into snow (it’s snowing while the trees are budding). Everything outside is snow this morning. The paintings are more like notes for the moment, just beginning and stopped short.

“Here in New Mexico”, my neighbor Lebeo told me, we call this “Febrero Loco” because winter seems to go on forever not listening to Spring which seems to want to speak out of the cracks and we’re stuck with these two unpredictabilities, this one thing not listening to the other one thing.”

I show a picture on instagram of this, my sketchbook/diary:

My notes on sifting the world are unattributed. Maybe I pieced it together from something beautiful said in my Mexico workshop. It was probably spoken much more beautifully so I picked an insanely delicious smelling blossom from a tall tree and pressed it in that page until all its scent of anise and honey faded and it turned brown, brown being the most beautiful color a cool pink could turn actually and this morning I’m trying to paint the brown. Anyway, it marked the sifting of the world. What do I sift the world for…what? Home I think. Some faded scent, love notes left, lost, found, left.

2/14/23

Furthermore notes: I’m in NYC putting together our new apartment (thanks IKEA!) in a hobbit house in Sunnyside that is closer to the Queens of my mother and my grandparents. I think I love it here. I am writing about the comfort I’m finding in the familiarity of a NewYork neighborhood that acts like all the villages of the world wrapped into one, with lilac bushes, friendly dogs (and owners) and all the food here in Sunnyside. I’m working at the dining room table for now and working through a stack that looks like this:

…and this:

…and proud of this little tableau that I just realized has a glass eye, a gift from an old boyfriend in Iowa City, probably the second most unromantic yet actually pretty romantic thing I’ve ever received: