Legacy in a small world

A chance purchase, an artist restored

Recently, a old friend of my family’s purchased a painting at a vast local recycling/re-use center. I have to assume he bought it because he liked it, had a spot on his walls that needed filling. And maybe because, as below, it was $8.

As he was loading his purchase into his trunk, he flipped it over and saw this:

That’s my sister! This family friend, without meaning to, bought a painting my sister Carla made, our sister whom he knew from childhood, our sister who passed away in 2013.

Based on the card stapled to the back, Carlita made this painting in the oughts, well before the glioblastoma — or the marriage or the Catholic re-birth, take your pick in the chicken-or-the-egg, which-came-first revolving door of explanation, which never explains, which never helps it make sense.

Carla painted this when she was still the multi-talented, competitive, clever, whip-smart know-it-all her we knew, the her who subsequently vanished, devoured & replaced by what came next. The grief of losing a sibling years before their actual physical death, of being pushed out of their life — all those years of trying to understand it, trying to find a way through, to bridge the willed estrangement: so fucking painful.

I felt lucky that in the last months before she was completely gone, while she could still haltingly move and speak, she allowed me back in. I can remember sitting in her living room with her and her young daughter (on eggshells) and just feeling confused and sad and angry. How did my sister — the painter, the ceramicist, the insanely-gifted baker, the foodie — how did she end up in this sparsely-furnished apartment, only images of Jesus and the saints thumbtacked to the walls?

I tell myself she chose what she chose, that those last years were as she wanted them to be. That she wanted and needed the life she constructed, no matter how alien, how inconceivable given how we grew up and where, given who (we thought) she was before. That, though, was obviously the whole point. She cut all ties to her past, and so out I went, too, made to pay the price of our parents’ mistakes.

I get it. I didn’t like it at the time, but also totally understood that she did what she needed to do to survive, to get through facing a (second) terminal illness in her too-short life. She did what the fuck she wanted and needed.

Including not paying the rent on the storage unit that housed all of the art she had produced over the years, so that the owners pushed her work to the curb.

Which may be how one of her paintings ended up, through who knows what twists and turns, back in extended-family hands.

Our friend buying that surprise-Carla painting is such a gift. Now i’m obsessed with her legacy as an artist, with restoring that identity that was core to her sense of self for so long. I’m not saying she needs a retrospective at MOMA or anything — just that there’s something that feels so right about documenting this aspect of our sister. Someday maybe her daughter will stumble on the catalogue of Carla’s work that we’re assembling, find this little piece of her mother that she may not have known or known about.

It feels like the least we can do. It feels like the only thing we’re allowed to do, to celebrate the her we knew, even though she utterly rejected that her in the years it took her to leave this earth. She took her comfort in religion, and we take ours in the funny fortuitous find of this painting — this reminder that Carla was so much more than what she was at the very end, confined to her bed, VHS tapes of Catholic masses playing on a loop on the small tv across from her bed.

We’ll never know anything about the why or the how of her illness, transformation and death, that makes any of it any easier to accept. But we can know & celebrate who she once was, through all these beautiful traces she left behind, all this art she created with her clever clever hands

xo

Open Invitation: if you have a Carla work — a painting or ceramic object — in your home, please be so good as to Comment with photo so we can add your item to the Carla-logue. Thank you!