HELLO

A portrait, as it turns out

I made a painting in 1999 of a woman's very large mouth and most of her nose. I left out the eyes. I'm not sure if that was a decision. It’s a self-portrait but I didn’t use a mirror or a photograph. The lips are red in the way I thought some lips might actually be red (mine are not). The center of the upper lip is arguably clitoral. The ground is warm, all ochre and peach, lit from somewhere inside the skin. My skin is olive, though, perhaps with hints of ochre but no peach whatsoever. The nose is more angular than mine. I don’t remember what I was going for. Whatever it was, I thought it was BAD ASS with all the sincerity a 22-year-old has.

I made it during what I would generously describe as a complicated time. I was taking a gap year between college and law school. My parents had cut off communication with me over this “time off” which they dually ascribed to my foolishness and to the influence of a former professor 25 years my senior with whom I was in a relationship – which was most certainly the bigger issue for them. I know. I know! I was twenty-something and certain I knew what I was doing, which is the most twenty-something thing I can report about the situation.

I spent that year in Boston. I didn’t have any connection to the city, but the professor had gone to school there and knew some fancy people who could theoretically help me if I needed it. I also knew someone from college who needed a roommate for an apartment she’d rarely use, because she was moving to Boston for a boyfriend who wasn’t ready to admit that’s what was happening. Lastly, I had tenuous connections to someone three degrees of separation away who “pulled some strings” to get me an administrative job at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. My days were spent filing papers at the MBTA (yes literally placing papers in file folders and those folders in rows and rows of metal drawers; it was 1997). Weeknights between 6:30-9:30pm I could be found in Continuing Ed classes at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts. I went to work, spent $3.75 on a soup and bagel lunch from the deli in the lobby of the building across the way, took the T to school, arrived home late to make a meal of a bun-less burger and pickles, and went to sleep in the sole, narrow bedroom that fit two twin mattresses with 8 inches between them. I can’t remember where I did my laundry or what I did on the weekends. A few times I hung out with a friend who was at Harvard Law. A few weekends, the prof visited me. One weekend an old boyfriend was in the city and needed a place to crash and it took a lot of words and a flash of anger to convince him take my roommate’s bed. Somewhere in all of those things I became a person who wore Chelsea boots (Nine West, brown).

I painted the face during that period. I used a cheap prewrapped 18”x24” canvas, only ¾” deep, the fabric (I use the term generously) haphazardly stapled around the back by a machine that was in a hurry, and factory-primed.

I needed to make a self-portrait and that’s what I made without looking at my face. The/her/my face could be communicating surrender, refusal, invitation, seduction, surprise, vacancy, bemusement. She could be saying “Fuck me” or “Fuck you.”

A friend saw it many years later and wanted to buy it, but I couldn’t sell it. That painting had been keeping me company for two decades. It said something about me at 22 that I’m still deciding how to feel about. I thought I’d made a self-portrait, but in fact I had made a portrait.

I offered my friend a compromise: I’d repaint it for her. Same composition, same scale, same open mouth with that darkness inside it. I repainted it a little cooler, a little less internally lit. Cooler, the lips didn’t read so much as vagina as they did vamp. Slightly wider nose, And then I added a word. The letters are different sizes, so it looks like the word is in motion, leaving the lips as you watch.

The word is HELLO.

The original painting, the one I kept, is just an open mouth, all red and mute. Given a second chance, she said hello, not needing a response but leaving room for one anyway.