Art Mo(ns)ther by Alexandra Rae

Art by @getarealjobkid on IG

Content Warning: this article contains mature language and themes.

1.

I have never been in love with anyone, except with words. 

2.

A passage from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation:

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” 

But what if I want to risk the rain to create the thing? There is no tongue waiting for me at home. And I heard beauty is in the mundane. 

3. 

The torrent of creating other worlds, strangers’ smiles, what could be but hasn’t yet become, sex, handmade blights, nights spent dancing under neon, plucking at the roots of liberation, red lipstick, trees, the mélange of the known and other: this is what interests me. All things undomestic, detached from belonging. They could all disappear at any moment, and perhaps it’s this, this fact of impermanence, that makes me love them most. Forever insinuates Always, a stasis in which I crave in art but not in the hood of marriage or state. 

When I was a girl, I drew wedding dresses with sparkles, trains, layers upon layers of ruffles, but no meaning. The princesses I admired on screen were adorned with designs similar to the ones I fashioned with my crayons, arriving at their happy endings with a tiara and a man and, sometimes, a swollen belly. A sliver of gold and the expected pregnancy that came with it was a cause for celebration. Happy wife, happy life. Happy mother, have another. I always chose to dress up as Belle, because I thought she looked the most like me and she, too, had an affinity for reading. But even in the days of my grandmother’s nimble fingers stitching me a gown of yellow garb for Halloween, I knew what I truly wanted from Beauty was her reconciliation with the forbidden. To be the one that is capable of loving The Beast and have something to say about it. To be told “No” and wear the dress anyway. To not leave behind who you are. 

4. 

By the time I was twelve, talk of babies was more than child’s play. It was serious. “How many kids do you want?” my playground pals would ask at the top of the climbing dome. But even saying “None” didn’t feel like enough. I didn’t know why.

Women my age now – twenty-two – are becoming mothers and wives and living very successful lives. I am happy for them. But now I know. It is not love or attachment to another that I want to be consumed by in this era of my life. It is art. I want to be an art monster. 

5. 

Similar to the princesses’ natural transition from damsel in distress to wife to mother, I progressed from girl artist to woman artist. In making girl art, a playful take on replication and the spinning of my own fairytale, I discovered my need to make woman art: rage to page, (un)conventions, detached from belonging to form or genre. This isn’t to say I believe there is one way to make art as a woman, because what kind of artist – or woman – would I be if I engaged in such singularity? 

We are no longer in the straitjacket of the twentieth century when women were expected to be one thing: homemakers. As wives and mothers, women could not afford to be taken seriously as artists. It was forbidden. It was for men. Sylvia Plath had to mythologize herself as a monster who ate men like air to make sense of her anger; the suffocation she felt as poet, mother, and wife to a cheating husband. Elizabeth Smart could never leave her affection towards George Barker at the door in her writing. The women artists who never penned or painted anything because of their promise to the domestic saddened me. So many women making a home, when they wanted to be making a world. 

Singularities are for the past. There are millions of women artists who get married and have children and can still create what they are compelled to create. There are many whose families actually inspire their art. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts would have never been written if she hadn’t met Harry or become Iggy’s mother. The Handmaid’s Tale was published after Atwood’s daughter was born. Halsey’s album cover for “If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power” (one of my favorite albums of all time) is her breastfeeding her baby on a throne. These women hail from the intersection of creating art and creating life. A difficult place to be, I assume, but not impossible. 

6.

I know one day I will fall in love and maybe get married. I have a gift for tending to other’s needs and I love dresses. This also means I have the potential to become a mother, but motherhood will remain only a potential for me. I want more life, more happiness, more humanity to be brought into this world. But I want to do it through art.

7. 

Morning to night, my love affair with the page. Once, I worked on a memoir piece for a workshop class for fourteen hours. I locked myself in an empty classroom on a Saturday and even brought food so I wouldn’t have to leave. My hair hadn’t been brushed in four days. Covered in dry-erase marker and red pen, my hands cramped from revising. But still, I didn’t stop writing until it was done. I came home around midnight, exhausted but enlivened by what I had done. The aftermath of this consumption by art left me alive. Would I have felt the same way if I had humans to keep alive all day? If my pens were replaced with binkies and bottles? There is no way for me to know, or want to know. A family member called me “selfish” once for not wanting to have kids. Monstrous, even. 

I think therefore I am. I know what I am willing to be consumed by. 

8. 

I dressed up as Belle again for Halloween two years ago. My Gigi altered the dress. This time, I had to ruin part of her work. A fake claw mark tattoo covered the right side of my face. Blood dripped from it, leaving vermillion flecks across my chest. I was Beauty mauled by The Beast. In this fairytale I created, I was the one who survived. Did killing the monster make me the villainess? Was I still a princess without my prince? In the name of art, simplicity of personhood does not exist. I was a woman, a princess, and an art monster. 

9.

Jeanette Winterson penned it first, this desire to consume and be consumed by words:

“If we want a living language, a language capable of expressing all that it is called upon to express in a vastly changing world, then we need men and women whose self is bound up in that work with words” (Art Objects, pg. 36). 

To live through language! To know the possibilities of self resides in the possibilities of words! What a triumph. What a life. 

10. 

My spouse waits for me. In the kitchen. In bed. They keep calling my name. 

Darling, I must write. Darling, you are not my darling yet. Art is. 

11. 

I walk into the rain. I leave my umbrella at home. My mascara runs into my eyes. My toes are soaked from not wearing boots. Soon all I am is a wet lost thing. I keep going. I stay in this mess for a while, with no one around to rescue me. The storm eats me and I eat it. Language is my love, my pathogen, the genesis of my existence as an art monster.