Use your thumb for the clouds, my Mom said.
It was the pandemic. My life had blown up, I was living with two labs in an old farmhouse on an island, and nobody was allowed to go near anyone else.
Creatively, I didn’t have another book in me. My band couldn’t get together to play. I had given up writing for newspapers. So, I decided to paint again.
My ex hadn’t let me put my art up on the walls, you see, so I had just stopped. I went along with what she wanted. I did that.
So I dug out some paint and brushes and sat down at the long table in the dining room. The first one was a scene from around here, from a photo I took while riding my bike way out along a trail. A field of canola and a line of trees. And a sky.
It looked okay; it was okay. But the clouds, which reached across the sky like a god’s fingers? I couldn’t get them right. I called my Mom.
She was an artist. Her paintings hung in galleries and homes across Canada. She was alone, too, because of the pandemic, but we talked on the phone every single day, twice a day. Morning and night.
“Use your thumb,” she said to me. “Not your brush. Use your thumb.”
So I did. And it worked. It was right. I was proud of it, so I put a photo of it up on the Internet. Right away, an old friend in Ottawa said she wanted to buy it. When I was sure she wasn’t joking, I sent it to my friend. And my Mom was happy.
“See?” she said. “You’re an artist. You’ll be better than me in no time.”
I wasn’t, of course. I’m not. I’ll never be as good as she was, in every conceivable way. But painting made me feel something I hadn’t felt in ten years – joy – and so I kept going. There’s been dozens of paintings since then, and even an art show. She coached me and advised me through all of it.
My Mom, Lorna Emma Bridget Cleary Kinsella, coached me and my brothers through all of our lives, too, until we grew up and moved away. Despite the distance, she remained the bond that kept us all together – my Dad, my three brothers. She was the centre.
She was raised by a single mother, the original feminist, Irene Cleary. There were seven of them in their smallish apartment in Montreal, two sons and five daughters. My Mom was the oldest girl.
Sons often think of their mothers as beautiful, but ours truly was. She was this radiant, dark-haired beauty from Montreal’s North End. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor, people would often say, and she did. She was beautiful in her heart, too.
She met my father, an aspiring doctor and future military officer, at a dance when she was 17. She told us she knew he was the one. She waited for him, declining (many) other suitors. They married in 1955 at the chapel at Loyola, where he had gone to high school and college.
My Dad was a doctor, but he was not a wealthy man. He believed that health care was a right of citizenship, and that no one should ever profit from illness. My mother believed that, too. So, while we were not poor, we were not ever rich. We didn’t eat out much, we didn’t have fancy vacations. My Mom cooked everything, and made her own clothes, and rehabilitated abandoned furniture. And she painted.
She loved Canadian scenes, but she loved painting children and old people, too. Many times – and still, now – people say to me she had a Group of Seven style, one that revealed her deep love of this country. Her works were always sought after, but she was modest. We’d tell her she didn’t sell them for enough.
She taught art. She studied art. Growing up, there was always the smell of oil paints and linseed oil in our family homes in Montreal, Dallas, Kingston and Calgary. Her art – and the art of others – filled our walls, and was often stacked up when there was no more room.
She always insisted we call, no matter how late, to say where we were and how we were getting home. She laughed (and defended me) when teachers told her I was a radical and a trouble-maker. She tolerated the punk rock racket coming up the back stairs, because she said she liked knowing where we all were. My best friends, in their biker jackets and skinny jeans and homemade Clash T-shirts, would always gather at my house – to see my Mom and Dad, I suspected, and not so much me. My friends still call them “our other parents.”
Our home always radiated warmth and love, and my Mom was at the centre of it. When our Dad died in Kingston in 2004, all of us expected she wouldn’t stay there – that she would move to Toronto, where we were. But she didn’t. She remained in Kingston for ten more years with her little dog Maggie, and kept painting, and she kept declining expressions of interest from men. “They’re not your father,” she’d say. “There will never be a man as beautiful as he was, for me.”
She came to Toronto, eventually, but never got the hang of the place. (Few do.) When the pandemic arrived, she and I would meet at the fence on her main-floor balcony in the Beach, and I would give her canvases and brushes and paint. Titanium white was hard to find during Covid, but I got some for her. For the clouds, maybe.
She painted. She made it through, never getting sick. And, when it was finally over, that all changed. She was 90 years old, and she fought it. But cancer finally claimed her on this day one year ago, just as it had taken my Dad, 19 years and one month before.
I have one painting of hers, now, raised up higher at my house than all the others, so that I can always see it. It is of a river, moving past some trees, a reddish sky is seen through their branches. On the left, there is a white patch of canvas, with no paint on it. It is where she stopped, perhaps because the end was near. Would it have been a bit of cloud? Would she have used her thumb?
Now, I look at her art on my walls and marvel at her talent, and marvel at the boundless beauty of her. And I marvel, too, at how blessed I was to be the son of Lorna Emma Bridget Cleary Kinsella, who was an artist and my mother, and who I love and miss with all my heart.
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