There is perhaps nothing so egregious in the history of art than the human impulse to link beauty to perfection, to cite nature as the cause, reason, proof for this link. Indeed, the rejection of beauty in 20th-century art need not have happened if we had been willing to question Kant from the outset, to question the masculine impulse to pair beauty with sublime aesthetic, with smooth surfaces, with lack of appetite, with “natural” “perfection.” Indeed, perhaps nothing reveals nature’s abhorrence of perfection so much as an eclipse, so much as the perfect, fleeting alignment of earth, moon, and sun.
Light winks out, birds stifle their songs, insects begin their twilight hum in the midheaven hours. Leaves cower and close, flowers strip themselves of their petals in the face of natural perfection. Nothing lives; for a moment everything dies, or strives toward dying. Beauty loses its sense in the face of perfection, becomes not much more than a chaos of untimely sound. So, too, with motherhood. Our virtual images of it too often eclipse the beauty with the perfect: the mother cannot have appetite, she must have all the right angles. We force our faces closer to our screens, seeking out humanity, seeking out art, but we only find proof of the eclipse: pixelation, the child’s hunger, the parent subsumed into all of the synonyms for perfect, all of the synonyms for beauty as a mother: self-sacrifice, gratitude, exhaustion, joy, an impenetrable, inarticulate still-life of life.
In all the old stories, the moon is linked to the mother, the earth is linked to the mother. Early civilizations dreaded eclipses, how they portended catastrophe, perfection as the myth read wrong, the tale told backwards, the moon turned red, the earth unknowable, the mother defaced, disembodied.
Emily LaCour’s paintings follow these threads, a full moon glows with the portent of yellow, the child’s looming head block’s the mother’s face from view. Then, here: the sweet conch of a baby’s ear; here, the echo of the mother’s, the sweetness belied by the blue and black and swift shadow of LaCour’s strokes, as if the artist-as-mother has at first begun to strive for the catastrophe of the sublime but then stopped herself. The figure of mother begins to emerge, then, out from under the child; beauty is not rejected here so much as affirmed as a circular thing, the moment of death contained within the process of giving birth and living past it. Life–and art–and motherhood–in LaCour’s work emerges not as a rejection of beauty so much as a rejection of perfection, so much as a rejection of the individual figure in favor of a table of them, a pair of them, the relationships and brush-strokes lopsided but full of a divine and clarifying light, a light that even death must contain.
In the ancient world, the high court worried that the eclipse portended death for the king and so hastened to replace him with a commoner, trussed up as a dummy sovereign, an unlucky doppelganger. Let this nobody die, they said, let us save our king. Motherhood sometimes feels this way, LaCour’s paintings assert, the mother the dummy, the infant preserved. But the beauty arises from the way the paintings push past this surface, into the messy depths, where the figures melt into each other, the yellows and golds rising up out of the blue, naming the fiction of causal links in the face of ineffable light.
“I picture the recipe card that has been photocopied out of a cookbook, written on and stained, scribbled through, handwritten, photocopied, shared in group text, adapted, forgotten, exalted, made family doctrine.” —Emily LaCour
CS: I’ve been so interested in the texture of your paintings for years—I admire the way your brush strokes evoke sensation in the body of the viewer, a reminder that good art gazes back out at the world beyond its frame. I especially get this sense with the paintings of mothers, infants, and embrace that comprise Full Circle. We cannot see the eyes or details of most of the faces you’ve painted for the figures in this show. And yet the painted bodies call out to and implicate the “real world” body through a kind of full-circle, sensational gaze. Could you talk a little about your artistic process for the show in this light?
EL: I work with the figure but really make marks through my body first and foremost so I love that it evokes sensation for you! My felt experiences are stored in my nervous system and are full of potential action to shape what comes next. The felt experience is not any one specific memory, or just for me/my own.
It can feel a little like channeling.
When I make moves with that unnamable thing, it is a way for me to see it again subjectively and objectively—to abstract and clarify feelings the way a dream might. It is transcribed as something happening now; color, line, clumps of paint, and layers dug in.
The painting Birth is one where I did not feel inclined to articulate separate faces. I made marks based on the feeling of pouring into another being, caring for something so tremendously. The woman’s body is upside down and pooling into forms that hold this glowing mystery in a cocoon of lines. The glow, a sac around the woman’s face, and the thing she is holding—a baby. I didn’t have an exact idea of the image when I started, but I knew I had an allotted time at the studio before I had to get home for the next feed, and I needed to paint that gutting feeling of pouring yourself into another and ringing out.
A theme in my work over time has been two figure forms intertwining and separating and the way that complex things about relationships of all sorts can be communicated in paint. I seek to find the flow between figure forms. As a twin said in the Psychology of Twinship, “To be just one person, it really is kind of scary.” I am getting to an age where I can see patterns in the work—that the work changes, the particular relationships I am speaking about change, but the root of the work remains the same.
CS: I know you’ve been interested in the eclipse cycle—in how that “too perfect” natural alignment of sun, moon, and earth seems to call forth the thoughts, feelings, sensations of early motherhood. What was it like to be a pregnant artist? How did your role as a mother play into the creation of paintings like Life Cycle, Care, and Mother? Was the meaning we make out eclipses, the moon, mythic stories of the archetypal mother present for you as a new mom? As an artist who was also navigating the care of an infant?
In both painting and motherhood, perfection leaves little room for honesty!