The clock and the mirror 

(b-side text)

I

We bought a house out in Willoughby, Ohio, where dad grew up. And my mother wanted—she liked it cause she wanted my brother and I to have some place to play and it had a big yard.

The above and following transcribed texts are excerpts from a recorded conversation I had with my mother, Sue, or sometimes Susie, over the phone not long before her death in 2003.

The girls in the neighborhood they wouldn't play with me for two years. Because there had been a girl living in that house that they were friends with and they were so mad that she moved that they wouldn't play with me.

The house was built in 1929. My mother moved there with her parents and brother in 1951, when she was five years old. Her father was Lynn, her mother was Jeanne and her brother was Mike. The family surname was Robinson.

II

This is a painted, imaginatively reconstructed and remembered view of the front upstairs bedroom of the house.

My mother and her brother slept in this room when they were children. During one of our recorded phone calls she told me about a recurring dream she had in the room.

When I was a kid, about six years old, I used to dream this constantly. It was in the summertime always, and I slept by the window in a little bed, and there was a little light there, and in my dream the light was on, and there was a man crawling through the window with a gun, and just as he was about to shoot me I’d wake up and I’d scream and wake the whole house up.

III

That’s her and her brother in the window. He was three years older. She described seeing him get out of bed in the middle of the night to check on the raccoons he kept in a small shed in the backyard.

He used to walk in his sleep, get out of bed, walk out to the coon cage and see the coons and then walk back in the house and go back to bed—and never woke up. He was about eight or nine. I remember him doing it. I saw him. We slept in the same room. I saw him getting out of bed. I’d go and get my father and say, Mike is sleep walking again for the coons. So we’d follow him out there to the coon cage and he’d talk to him and then we’d all walk back into the house and go back to bed. But he never woke up.

Their parents divorced when my mother was thirteen. While I was working on the painting I wondered how long she shared the room with her brother. Maybe after her father moved out she and her mother shared the back bedroom room and her brother slept in here alone. I don’t know.

IV

In the mid 1990s I was upstairs rummaging through the vanity drawers and found snapshots of my mother and her brother and their father. They were taken, one after the other, I assume by my grandmother. In every picture my grandfather is frowning and my mother and her brother are looking straight into the camera, unhappily with blank stares. I saw the date, 59, printed on the white scallop cut borders and yelled down to my grandmother, what year were you and grandpa divorced? 1959 she yelled back.

Her brother married and moved out of the house in the early 60s and my mother left a few years later. Then I was born in 1972. She carried me into the house only seven or eight years after she moved out, which seems impossible to me. When I was a child the house felt filled with time. Everything in it was like an ancient artifact. The furniture, my mother and uncle’s toys, it all seemed left over from a time long past that was actually much nearer to me than I knew.

V

During the eulogy I gave at my grandmother’s funeral in 1999 I described the house as being big. My uncle, always a stickler for facts, approached me afterward and in a disparaging tone corrected me, it wasn’t a big house, he said.

I was still thinking of the house as I did when I was a child, when the house was filled with so many uncontainable worlds. Going to sleep and waking up in this room was just one of those worlds. Worlds that had nothing to do with the factual scale of anything.

The room was a macabre nightly prayer my grandmother and I would say before falling asleep, if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take, it was a warm, comfortable bed with maybe something monstrous underneath it, it was my mother’s crayon drawings pinned to the wall, it was every detail of window, rug, lamp and table, and more than anything else it was the curious, mostly pink wallpaper with ribbons of flowers and fluttering butterflies frozen in midair, and then strangely, in all this, there was the head, in profile, of a balding and whiskered old man. It was years before I saw the old man was just another butterfly.

VI

By the mid 80s and 90s I no longer slept there. But I would still go into the room and look through the closet and vanity and night table drawers, looking through all the old things; the hat box, a Brownie camera, the old photographs—and all of it was still as remote and time haunted for me as it was when I was a child.

After I moved away from Ohio to New York City and after I finished art school and was married I only returned to the house on short visits. During one of those short visits, not long before my grandmother died, I made a series of powdered graphite drawings, of different views from different angles of the room, soft powdery images that looking back at them now seem like they’re about to dissolve, as if intuitively I knew, then, it was all about to disappear completely.

VII

My grandmother lived there from 1951 until her death in 1999. For more than thirty years she lived there alone. She kept the front bedroom immaculate, the bed made, everything in order and in its place as if at any moment a child would again be sleeping there. After she died the house was quickly sold. I spent days with my uncle and mother clearing it out. My uncle and I, when we were upstairs, would often stop, confused as to what to do next. In one of these moments he sat down on the edge of the bed across from the mirror and tried to tell me something, but he never quite got it out. He looked ahead and held up his hand, knife-like in front of him, to say something decisive, they were always fighting, he said, and then he stopped again, and decided instead to remember another room, at his grandparent’s house, in western New York, where he had a view of the lake, somewhere he had been happier, which made me think the same thing about this house and this room, where I had been happier. When it was just my mother and I she was more helpful. She knew what everything was and exactly what to throw out, no she hated that old thing, pitch it, she was in ill health at the time and sat on the cedar chest in the room, though she was thin and of average height, in that moment, she looked all out of proportion and the room seemed shrunken and small around her.

VIII

After we cleared everything out I stored what I saved from the house and from this room in a nearby storage locker. I saved all the snapshots from the vanity drawers, the pictures my grandmother always said she would organize into albums someday but never did. I’ve been moving pieces of what’s left of the furniture from that room all over the place for the last twenty five or more years. The vanity, the night table and lamp, for a while I had the bed. I still have the rug, and light fixture, and a purple glass door knob I took from the room. I suspect the door knob was put there by my grandfather because it looked like an amethyst stone, my mother’s birth stone. And there was a small “piggy bank” in the shape of a house that I kept, it was always left out somewhere up there. And it’s little things like that, that for me, provoke the deepest memories. I had the strangest feeling during the making of this work, like I was dreaming it more than painting it.

IX

I thought about titling the work, Between the Clock and the Bed, after Edvard Munch’s self-portrait, but that made the work more about passing time than keeping time. This is a work more about reconstructing time and regaining time and memory, so instead I titled it, The clock and the mirror, indicating more of a reflection on time and memory. The other artist I thought about was Alberto Giacometti, his work is soaked with time too, and sometimes when I remember my grandmother’s house I think about Giacometti’s work, especially his “matchstick palace” at 4am. This work was painted in my basement studio at 236 6th Avenue in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. A space that is roughly the same size as Giacometti’s studio was but with a lower ceiling. It was painted on a wall exactly the size of the painting and sometimes that made me feel like I was opening up a portal to another time.

-TR Ericsson, Brooklyn , NY