Private Art

My parents’ home is a monument to the world and to our lives. We brought a whole tube of paintings when we moved from Tunisia, removed from their frames and wrapped tightly together and covered in layers of leather and plastic. They were one of the first things we put up in their new home—one of the first I considered when decorating. My dad, who is clever with his hands and can figure out how to build most things, made new frames and stretched the canvas over them. He even built a custom stand for their largest piece—an oil painting Mom bought at the artisan fair the spring before they left, depicting two women in white and red robes under an arch in the downtown medina. Last spring, just as the world’s collective panic over the Coronavirus began and just before my friend Melody fell into a coma, my mom and my friend Esther and I sat looking at that painting. 

“It’s just enormous,” Esther said. Her black hair was pulled up in a frazzled ponytail. She curled on the edge of the couch our landlords had left, staring up at the ridges of paint. 

My mom laughed. “It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” she admitted. She had found Hanen Meknessi’s work at a booth at the Kram—the massive indoor artisan market held near Tunis every spring, featuring rug makers and basket weavers and silversmiths and painters—and taken photos of her favorite pieces. She and my dad picked this one without immediate reference to the size. The resulting painting dwarfs our couch and nearly touches the ceiling. Filling the corner entirely, it looks like you could step through into the street and hear the cobblestones echo off the rounded arches and high walls of the old city. 

We watched the sun play over it contemplatively. “There’s just something about it—” I said unhelpfully. I drew a leather pouf over the camel-hair rug—a handmade Amazigh piece and the first furniture item we’d bought in Tunisia—and plopped down right in front of the painting, staring up at it. “I can’t believe she did this whole piece with a palette knife. I’ve tried that, and it’s hard.” 

“How can you tell?” Esther asked. 

I gestured, miming a sweeping motion over the canvas. “It’s easier to lay the paint on thickly with a palette knife. The strokes are pretty broad and expressive—you can’t even see the woman’s face, it’s just a smudge—and you can tell where she’s scraped away paint on the door in the background and up there—See?—And the lantern has such sharp edges. That’s from the edge of the knife.” 

Esther hummed agreement, resting her chin on her hand. “It’s the colors for me.” 

My mom nodded. “That’s part of why we picked it! It looks like that woman—the one in red—is being invited out of the darkness.” 

Two women—or shapes of women—in traditional Tunisian robes face each other on the left of the canvas. A woman in bright cadmium red stands in the purple and blue shadows of an arch spanning the top of the painting. Beyond the curved darkness of the arch stands the suggestion of a woman in white, almost blending into the whitewashed walls around her. Behind her, a golden door. Looking at it, I can hear the echo of rain off the slick cobblestones and watch the shifting of the light on shadowed walls. There is a hint of damp in the arch, reflecting the bright red of the woman’s dress. There is bright reflection in the color-splotched, blocky ground that fades into an indistinguishable line between ground and wall. It is a painting that draws you into its world. 

Whatever the artist’s intention, it really does look like the woman in white beckons her friend out of the darkness of the arch and the slick cobbles and into the brightness of the courtyard—perhaps to whatever is beyond that golden door. 

My parents’ house is filled with art from many of the countries we have seen and lived. A pair of paintings—one of a mountain river in vibrant tropical greens and misty grays and one of a village street in sienna and dusty brown—they purchased from artists in Venezuela early in their marriage. Then the late dictator, Chavez, kicked foreigners out of the jungle so he could mine more gold and oil. We left when I was six, but we took the paintings. We kept the carved birds that a tribal artist, Ijte, made for my brother and me, and we framed the sketchbook pages of birds and jungle foliage that he gave my grandparents. We have vivid blue butterflies and glittering green beetles and the shining multicolored feathers of a bird skull from the jungles of Brazil—some from my dad’s childhood and some from my great-grandmother’s personal collection. We have prints from an artist in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, made to represent Hebrew letters for sea and desert (Tunisia, the land between the desert and the sea). We have my dad’s old partner’s art hung in every room—beautiful watercolors of Tunisia made in the two years before his sudden death. We have prints of my dad’s own photography—of the weeds on Sabrine’s farm in Jendouba, of the shipwreck at the end of our favorite hike in Haouaria, of a fishing boat pulled up on our favorite beach in Gammarth. We have handmade rugs in nearly every room and collages and prints made by my brother and sea glass and coral and wood found on Mediterranean beaches. 

We even have my own paintings—one in almost every room. A watercolor that I eventually had tattooed. The delicate acrylic of a poppy that I brushed over a childish rendition of Jesus raising a basket filled with five loaves and two fishes. A boat that I painted for my parents’ 25th anniversary, two oil still lives, and my personal favorite: pomegranates in a bowl—shining red kernels spilling over swirls of blue-patterned ceramic. Ripe like the bagsful that we used to buy from the fruit stand, crack open together, and eat by the bowl with a spoon. 

My dad’s picture of the shipwreck in El Haouaria is the first time we followed the donkey trail along the ridge as the sun set, the world pinwheeling in my periphery. It’s the crunch of gravel underfoot and the crash of the deep purple waves so far below and the tumbling rocks as he clambered down to the water level to crouch in the surf and let the shipwreck loom large in the viewfinder. 

The painting of the medina in our living room encapsulates all eight years in Tunisia to me. It holds the sounds of the medina and the hush of bougainvillea and the echoing call to prayer. It also holds my mom and my friend and me, clustered around it, using our meager knowledge to say what this painting meant to us. 

The day that we heard the news that Melody had died in her coma, I pulled out my paints and the largest piece of watercolor paper I had and poured myself into a painting to commemorate her. I tried to use what I’d learned from teachers and friends over the years and filled the shadows beneath my tiger’s paw with green and red and purple and delicate jasmine. My art became a memorial of her strength and a gift for her husband. 

Despite the allure of museums and public art, despite the awe of centuries of styles and million-dollar paintings and expansive galleries filled with echoes of whispers and footsteps and light—there is something to be said about private art. Private art encapsulates a moment of personal and family history. It is a self-crafted memorial to lost friends. It is a monument to memory.