Looking back

My love of art comes from my mom. I know that's not very specific, but it's the best I can do.

Mom painted watercolors. My grandmother's house is full of them: colorful, twisted trees on the California coast and brushy abstractions of the cats next door, especially the fat one, Big Bertha. The paintings I like best are her Sierra Nevada landscapes.

Something occurs to me as I write this: I don't remember seeing Mom paint. That's not to say that she only painted in the absence of us kids, or when my father wasn't around. It's just that I remember the family experiences that surrounded her painting instead.

Especially the Sierra watercolors. Each year we took a family vacation to Silver Lake, a quiet mountain retreat undiscovered by people who need second homes. From there we took near-daily ten and twelve mile hikes. For a boy who spent 50 weeks a year in a comfy suburb, hikes past a mountain of shale called Elephant's Back into backcountry territory known as the Desolation Wilderness was roughing it. Sometimes we saw marmots.

Mom liked something simpler: the light. Mom didn't paint traditional mountainscapes. She liked to take a short, two-mile hike to a puddle surrounded by vast sheets of granite. We generously called it Granite Lake. She painted it so much that my dad nicknamed her 'Janet Granite.'

My mother was hardly the first person to fall in love with the Sierra's exposed granite. John Muir, who thought of the Sierra as a father thinks of a son, called the high country the "Range of Light." Muir wasn't speaking metaphysically: The granite that covers much of the surface of the Sierra Nevada is shockingly white. Sierra granite is inlaid with xenoliths, highly-reflective crystals that magnify and bounce light back up into the ionosphere. The result is a blinding brightness that emanates not from above, but from the ground.

That whiteness is in all of Mom's Sierra landscapes. The paintings are straightforward compositions with straightforward mountain colors. Blue: Water. Green: Trees. Grey: Dead trees. Mom liked dead trees. But what's striking about Mom's watercolors is how she played with that white. She clearly noticed that watercolor paper hints at both the texture and the brightness of Sierra granite; her best Sierra watercolors are spare, empty, much unpainted. Sometimes she heightened that effect by using watery dabs of opaque black to suggest the lichen that grows on granite, or to reference the shiny black chunks of xenolith in the rock.

To me Granite Lake was a big zero. No dramatic mountaintop rose from it. The landscape was barren because trees could hardly put roots down into granite. Joan Didion wrote something that I think of when I look at one of Mom's granitescapes: Certain places seem to exist mostly because someone wrote about them. Didion was talking about Faulkner and Oxford, Mississippi, or Hemingway and Kilimanjaro. For me, Granite Lake exists only because Mom painted it.

I wish I remembered being around my mother when she was painting, but I don't. Watercolors aren't that exciting to a 10-year old kid, so when Mom was painting I was off skipping stones or searching for summer snowpack from which I could start a snowball fight.

Most of what I remember about Mom and art has to do with what she did before and after painting. I remember going with her to Bowers, a Burlingame, Calif. art supply store that had narrow aisles and two big glass windows in front. The woman who ran the place (Mrs. Bowers?) was so nice that I was embarrassed to go into the store -- I was too young to know how to be nice back.

I remember driving to nearby Belmont where Mom took painting classes. Mom went to grad school at Stanford and didn't need art lessons in a suburban community center, but she probably liked being around other artists. While she painted, I sat in the car, a 1979 VW camper bus with a pop-top, reading books about a boy detective named Encyclopedia Brown.

I don't remember our family going to art museums - except for once. When I was ten, my parents took me to a Juan Gris retrospective at the Berkley Art Museum. Actually, my mother went to the exhibit and, by virtue of me-too groupthink, the whole family tagged along. I was induced to peacefully participate through the promise of a trip to a family-friendly cheeseburgerie called Fat Albert's. They made really good milkshakes.

I don't know why I remember that day. I'm sure I'd been in a museum before - and that I didn't really like them. On a family trip to Kansas City, Mom had wanted to go to the Nelson-Atkins. "But Mom," I had said. "We have museums at home. You can see paintings there!" The Fat Albert's bribe was intended to prevent such outbursts.

But at the Gris show I looked at the art and asked Mom questions about it. I don't remember if she answered them. I was impressed with the quiet authority of paintings hanging on a wall, and with the reverent way people responded to them. (How could all those people stand so still?) I passed the time trying to find objects - faces, guitars, cups - in Gris and feeling pretty proud of myself when I found them. Odd: I know I wanted to go to Fat Albert's, and I'm sure we went there after the museum, but all I remember now is Juan Gris.

Gris was one of my mother's favorite artists. I have no idea why. Mom was no particular fan of Spanish art and she was no cubist. There is no discernable Juan Gris influence in any of her watercolors.

But for some reason Mom was adamant about buying the Gris catalog. I have no idea why she was so set on it, and I have even less of an idea why I remember that. But I do, perhaps because her insistence on buying the catalog made it clear that art mattered, that Gris' art really mattered, and that paintings weren't something you looked at and then forgot about. If you liked them, you bought a book about them. Then you read it over and over.

And read it she did. For months I saw the Gris catalog everywhere around the house - in the kitchen, on our back porch where Mom frequently painted, in our den. It had a black cover and Gris' name on it in big, silver letters. There was also a Gris painting on the cover - a cubist composition of a blue guitar-table of some sort. Sometimes, when she wasn't painting or doing mom things (Mawwwwm, I'm huuuuungry), I saw her pencil notes into the catalog.

I'll never know why mom liked Juan Gris, what she thought about the Berkley exhibit, or what she wrote in that catalog. Less than two years after that afternoon in Berkeley she was dead. Today is the twentieth anniversary of her death.

Years later I sent family members searching through houses and basements in an effort to find that catalog. Why did Gris matter to my mom? Why did any artist matter to her? Why painting? Why watercolors? Why art?

It's my own fault that we never found that Gris catalog. I didn't realize that it was important to me until I was back in Missouri and in college, when I realized that I wanted to go to the Nelson-Atkins after all.