Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now housed in a private collection, the portrait offers a rare glimpse into Quinn’s early artistic process while communicating themes of loss, longing, dignity, purpose, parenthood, rebirth, and reciprocity.

Today, Quinn’s composite portraits of friends and relatives defy traditional portrait conventions. Employing a lone exquisite corpse technique, chance encounters of distorted and realistic body parts combined with incongruous brushstrokes create subjects that border on the unfamiliar, laying bare the body as an archive of undeveloped images. The embracing of chance, intuition, and the incorporation of familial memories highlight the spontaneous nature of his work. In their own state of becoming, the portraits express Quinn’s vulnerability and participatory role, and speak closer to the process of artmaking than the finished works themselves. Their dichotomous nature—being completed works that never quite seem finished—offer a surreal experience that remains firmly grounded in reality.

This reality is no less present in his mother’s portrait. In the black space of the foreground, she stands commandingly in swagger pose, reminiscent of Grand Manner portraiture. Bathed in a white light and taking up nearly the entire frame, her protruding stomach, rigid posture, and “chin-up” mentality, add to her regal and confident demeanor. The folds of her fuchsia gown add visual weight and further cast her apart from her gloomy environment, where a depressing, blue sky looms over inward-leaning grey towers to create a sense of claustrophobia. 

Born in 1977, Quinn grew up in poverty on the South Side of Chicago in the now demolished, and presumably depicted, Robert Taylor Homes. Built with good intentions in 1962 as a waystation to foster social mobility, federal and municipal policies, soon hijacked by private interests, allowed the buildings to fall into disrepair. Social disorder followed as living standards worsened throughout the 1980s and 90s; crime, gangs, and drugs became the norm. The Home’s notoriety, “considered the worst slum area in the United States” according to the Chicago Housing Authority in 1998, would unfairly extend to its inhabitants, who were nearly all Black. Exacerbating matters, the practice of segregated development created not only a “great wall of exclusion” but a “psychological barrier,” which strengthened negative stereotypes that would plague a whole community, spawning myths that remain all too prevalent today.[2]

The Artist’s Mother is at once a denouncement of such myths and an affirmation of humanity, embodying concepts of home and community, which often fail to extend to public housing.[3] Here, Quinn rightly expresses the body as “an amalgam of numerous experiences… built from a history of joy, sadness, ups, and downs.”[4] Her grey countenance, which mimics the towers in the background, surrenders to brown hues and full pink lips. While brown serves the purpose of skin tone, it also highlights certain elements within the composition: a fragmented eye, a delineated hand, and narrow legs. Eyes, one sensitive, the other ostensibly weary, can convey one’s memories and inner emotions; as windows to the soul, they maintain the capacity to tell narratives words alone cannot. Hands can connote work, responsibility, determination, caretaking, or reference a future act of creation. The hand’s prominent singularity, a possible reference to his mother’s partial disability due to multiple strokes, performs as an accessory to motherly greatness.

From the dreary, she emerges as a complex figure whose pillar-like stature confronts historic misconceptions, which the vanishing point behind her head assists in perpetuating. Through her confrontational gaze, she assertively erases and inverses this vanishing point, a visual metaphor for single-mindedness, or more aptly, tunnel vision. In doing so, she undermines once-assured gazes; she is not what she appears. Her defiant and towering presence, which renders the picture plane abstract, commands an act of submission, a beholder’s acknowledgment of their shrunken state and similitude with the receding towers in the background.  

Quinn’s baroque sensibility and compositional framing allow for such a submission to take place. While the pyramidal composition lends his mother stability, Quinn’s foreshortening of her right foot, presenting a passage between two worlds, places this stability in question only to reaffirm it. The foot’s formal insignificance, which gives the misleading impression of a safe and comfortable bird’s eye view, demonstrates its symbolic strength by withstanding a crushing environment, and possibly, the weight of a child. No matter the picture’s placement, whether hanging on a wall or sitting on the floor, one is unable to “look down” upon this woman; the foot’s deceptiveness, at once, reveals our culpable gaze and champions her irreducible presence.[5]

Bearing a symbolic weight similar to her meager right foot, the bright blue sole of her left sandal aids in our transcending of such limiting views while referencing his mother’s deceased, yet magisterial state. In formal terms, this blue provides visual relief from a black background and corresponds with the sky above, adding a lightness to her imposing stature. The connection evokes the Christian belief of death as gain and a new life in the beyond. Between feet, a delicate balance is struck, contributing to her dichotomous nature. While one appears to hover, the other is firmly grounded; their joining marks her eternal and palpable presence—two feet, two realms. In her fragmented state, she stands as a celestial being whose given corporeal presence extends from the felt absence of Quinn’s living memory. The balancing of these juxtapositions suggests not only a determined mother ceding to succumb to a “desperate” atmosphere, but a watchful, awe-inspiring maternal icon whose transcending of such settings bestows upon beholders gifts of resilience and comfort.

These gifts, conveyed through a calming smoothness that overtakes the harsh geometrics of her setting and fragmented make-up, also aid in capturing the conflicting nature of parenthood. The rigidity and stiffness of her posture, meant to convey a sense of fear, awe, and respect, are accompanied by soft outlines, bouncing strands of hair, pillowy draped folds, and a weightless flowing gown. These contrasts, which add a sense of playfulness to an otherwise unfriendly set of circumstances, are the convincing measures of a parent’s undeniable love, and a child’s acknowledgment of their parent’s role as disciplinarian, guide, and protector.

Seemingly a memorial portrait of his late mother, in superseding her referent, the painting communicates much more than an act of remembrance. The essence of the work, of his mother, hides in plain sight by way of the painted stroke. As gestures of intimacy and longing, they are the literal transformation of life into matter. Here, in this mood-inherent medium, his mother is both immanent and transcendent, and challenges further dichotomies of subject/object, active/passive, and animate/inanimate to lend her an irrefutable existence with equal participatory powers. The depicted hereafter paradoxically presents the here and now.

“At Wabash,” Quinn “learned… to be a human being… to transcend social conditioning… to be free,” an awakening he extends to his mother.[6] Expanding upon this notion, commonly said is that having children is akin to having your heart outside your body. This feeling is mutual for Quinn, hence the adoption of his mother’s name, which he signs on the back of every canvas as co-creator, accompanied by three hearts. In this sense, the picture presents a contradiction, who has given birth to whom? Regardless of her pregnant status, or if her belly perhaps houses an unborn Quinn, there is, nonetheless, an acknowledgment that he would not be where he is today if not for his mother’s sacrifices. As a bodily extension of Quinn’s memory, the portrait communicates a reciprocal act of creation in painterly form, a gracious and resurrectionary gesture of a beloved lost soul, and for Quinn, the beginning of a new life filled with passionate pursuits.

[1] Richard Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 28.  https://issuu.com/wabash_college/docs/wm_winter_2017

[2] Nicholas Degan Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale. Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 34, 50.

[3] Quinn’s mother “was literally around the building, helping people, feeding gangbangers and the drug users when they didn’t have anything to eat, letting guys help her with the groceries and paying them to help out.” “Mary: The Making of Nathaniel Mary Quinn.” Hindman Auctions, September 28, 2022. https://hindmanauctions.com/items/10615750-untitled-portrait-of-the-artist-s-mother#_edn1.; Bloom, Umbach, and Vale. Public Housing Myths, 57-59; Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2013), 17-18.

[4] Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 2.

[5] This analogy extends from my own experience with his mother while working as an intern at Hindman Auctions in Chicago and witnessing both the work’s installation and de-installation. Several times a day I walked past her hanging in the gallery. Each time, her silent gestures made subtle commands upon my body, a radiating stillness that beckoned me as if wishing to disclose a secret. Not once did I refuse to acknowledge her, whether through a quick glance or, when time permitted, through a more formal conversation, where, seemingly of my own volition, I walked respectably as I would toward any elder past the other pictures in the gallery—the massive Paul Jenkins on view never stood a chance. When standing before her, I felt inferior, but never unwanted. Each encounter was a boost in self-esteem. I looked forward to our conversations and contemplated them afterward. This would all last until her departure, where I witnessed her on the floor propped against the wall surrounded by shipping supplies. When I approached her saddened to say goodbye, even though I stood above her, my smallness remained intact. Her awesome presence denied her objecthood and demanded my humility, which I felt obliged in part for what she had given me. My sadness came in knowing that she had more to say and that I would never see her again in the flesh.

[6] Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” 28.

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Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm)

The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is still present. Leaving aside beauty’s bifurcation into the sublime and the beautiful, its historically malicious tactics,[1] and its reduced role to something nostalgic and irrelevant, what interests me is beauty’s moral dimension, in particular, its capacity to “intensif[y] the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries.”[2] With beauty as a starting point, my aim in sharing this picture is not to arrive at a singular meaning, but rather offer a formal investigation that highlights the beholder’s essential role in the viewing process in an attempt to understand, as scholar W.J.T. Mitchell wishes us to contemplate, what pictures want.

Tracey Emin is a multi-media, conceptual artist loosely affiliated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group that rose to prominence in the 1990s for their sensationalist art and entrepreneurial spirit. Throughout her oeuvre, Emin has expressed “how it feels to be a woman” through motifs of bodily absence and alienation.^[3] These themes can be seen in indexical artworks such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), My Bed (1998), and Death Mask (2002), among others.

The diaristic and the confessional, in which Emin’s work is so often read, is a response to her fraught upbringing. Her father, having a second family, abandoned Emin when she was young, leaving her family in poverty. She was raped at the age of thirteen and guiltily underwent two abortions in the early 1990’s, all which contribute to the unsettling quality her works tend to evoke. Like a Cloud of Blood is no exception; it was one of her first paintings after recovering from bladder cancer.

While all artworks mentioned can imply the absent body of Emin, a re-embodiment need not belong exclusively to the creator. Confronting solely the artwork, such an absence would invite the beholder to perform an “unselfing,” signaling a search beyond the singular and autobiographical for real and/or imagined others. As a characteristic of being in beauty’s presence, one’s selfish concerns vanish and direct themselves outward toward the concerns of others.

Elaine Scarry, in her book, On Beauty and Being Just, describes beauty as something sacred and unprecedented, an unexpected greeting that turns one to stone in its presence. In our reverence or in our staring, whether prolonged or for mere seconds, the sheer conviction of beauty causes a search for truth and opens one up to the world, people, and things. Enthralled by beauty, with its life-affirming and life-giving qualities, it makes one vulnerable and curious, inciting a desire to create or replicate, hence Scarry’s position of beauty as the basis for education.

She also acknowledges that beauty resides in the particulars, in this instance, lines and their formal relations. Building upon this notion, a line, or mark, is a present absence. It traces a moment in time, a past event that is no longer. This event is the all-too-ephemeral present structured and informed by our emotions. The individual mark, like time, constitutes such emotions. As latent forms of expression they require a close reading, or preferably, a greater visual attentiveness, a request quite at odds with the diminished attention spans yielded by the digital age.

In the painting, Emin’s lines are unsettling and convey a range of conflicting emotions. They appear rushed, scratchy, agitated, and frantic, fading when the ink runs out. Most are deliberate and aggressive, applied with a confident force, others affectionate, hesitant, and slow. Each individual mark, short or long, thick or thin, faint or distinct, implies a form of release, and along its journey can possess a different tone, personality, pulse, or intensity. The soft swell of the figure’s lower back along with the gentle curvature of its left knee compete against quick strokes of agitation, giving the impression that these caressing lines of self-care are meant to calm moments of pent-up frustration and/or uncertainty. Furthering this tension, forceful smears of deep magenta double at the top of the figure’s head and between its legs, forging a distressing mind/body connection. Comforting this upsetting scene are broader supportive swaths of muted pinks and white that sit below and cushion the contours of the figure, the very fibers of its being.

Yet not all marks can be attributed to the human hand. Seemingly taking on a will of their own, bloody streams of pink angst permeate the figure’s body and seep through the canvas, the figure’s perceived world, for pain slows time and invites loneliness. Solely belonging to one’s self, pain closes one off from the world. That said, the alienating nature of pain also unites people by virtue of all having experienced its effects.

Beauty’s long held correlation to truth affirms this figure’s fragility and pain. The exigencies of line, their perseverance and visceral tensions not only prompt but demand an engagement with the image and the environment that produced it—our world. In addition to conveying memories, consciously or not, the lines of this embodied image carry the artist’s silent and palpable presence. While the urge exists to ascribe Emin’s traumatic biography to the figure, an image extends beyond personal experience. It takes form from a wealth of collective imagery both real and fictive which an individual internalizes, recalls, and imaginatively transforms into an image of their own.[4] Regardless of whether this body belongs to Emin, there appears a tempering of the artist’s raw mental state on display, a coming to terms with the ghostly body before her, wishing for it not to disappear. Through the use of line, Emin builds up this body through traces of its painful past while simultaneously recognizing its need for care and compassion.

The figure’s vulnerability is further manifested by the gaps in the contours of its body, which the beholder fills in to repair the body to completeness. Although these interruptive gaps hint toward the figure’s disappearance and its slow decay into the affliction it suffers from, they also aid in the contour lines becoming ever more acute and in need of suturing. Becoming involved in the figure’s making, our eyes offer a form of nourishment. Sealing the body, clothing it in flesh, we animate the figure, lifting and removing it from the ground it was confined to. In our looking, wanting to empathize and care for this figure, we open ourselves up to the image, which, in turn, opens itself up to us and reciprocates a nourishing gaze. In this sense, the beholder gives life to the image, and the image affirms life for the beholder. With this reciprocal act, in our shared state of vulnerability, it allows us to reach a place of understanding wherein the figure’s world and our world become one; its burden is our burden.

Furthering this notion, the figure’s fleeting hand reveals a desperate impulse expressing a need, a want, or a desire. The chaotic manner in which these faint hurried lines are displayed—literally wearing themselves out—denotes multiple attempts to no avail. In addition to signaling a loss, the desperate gesture refers to its own vanishing. As if on its last breath, these fading lines are given a greater intensity, a felt sense of urgency. The figure’s frantic search leads one to hypothesize the what: a form of relief? a recovered self? bodily autonomy? longing? acknowledgement? a human’s touch? The beholder, however, via sight, has already provided a response to the figure’s plea, thus ending its search. Our restorative gaze acts as a metaphorical helping hand. Our vision is a haptic vision, a liberating recognition that attempts to pull this figure into existence, to rescue it from its lone state. It is a visual act that wishes for the figure, in a sense, to get out of its own head.

Beauty, Scarry asserts, demands a sense of “moral urgency” that comes with an urge to preserve and protect. The sketch-like quality of the image, its flattened perspective, the figure’s instability and human scale, and the visual weight of the medium atop the figure that ungraciously assists it further toward the bottom of the frame into nothingness and despair, adds to this sense of immediacy.Effectively weakening the power of the beholder, the image compels one to offer a more secure and nurturing environment, to reverse its downcast horizon. One must remember that a work of art is the objectification of human experiences; hence, we not only preserve and protect the artwork for its beauty, but its ability to express the beauty of being human and feeling alive, which extends to human rights and equitable justice. Scarry explains this urge as the “particular” manifesting itself into the “distributional,” that is—after succumbing to and identifying beauty—the need to share and convince another of the beauty they see in an effort to adjust another’s perceptual error (e.g., this essay). If such distribution is successful—meaning a population’s agreement on what is beautiful—actions, such as implementing new laws, would be upheld, and shouldered by a community, thus leading to a more just society.[5]

Having fortified a sense of solidarity with the figure, meeting it on equal terms, Emin’s work can be said to redirect claims of individualism toward helping our fellow man. Her work unabashedly embraces the less admired fundamental conditions of being human: vulnerability and dependency. Moreover, her telling of women’s stories through art—taking into account her own—can extend to a woman’s plight, the violence perpetrated against them, and reproductive rights, all of which the literal and metaphorical pressures of magenta come into play. Making explicit reference to female sexual anatomy and perhaps its inner bodily functions, these pressures direct attention to the mental and physical afflictions that plague these two sites. With this in mind, the previously mentioned streams of pink angst, which bleed down the canvas in unison, could be said to perform the dual role of signifying “period positivity” while acknowledging women’s slow and mentally draining fight for equality. But more to the point, and as Emin reminds us, “we all bleed.”[6]

Ultimately, what Emin’s work achieves—which all art should strive for—is that it provokes questions. Or put another way, demands answers. Art and our encounter with it presents a negotiation. Its aim is not to provide solutions, but to bring one closer to truth. Its ambiguous nature offers shared experiences and sustenance. While we all seek predictable and stable lives, it is art’s instability that we cherish, its ability to rattle our realities and awaken our cognitive faculties. To some, this is poppycock, hence the demonization of liberal arts and humanities programs in universities across the nation. But as we inch closer to climate catastrophe and a world where so-called “obscene” books cease to exist, all the while contending with an automated society run by AI, humans may soon be relieved of their critical thinking skills and agency and instead prescribed a permanent role as spiritual healers in search of new ways of knowing. So, in this not-so-fictional dystopian state, having the ability to master the art of close reading and engage in matters beyond the surface may come in handy after all, for being able to see beauty in the flatness of the everyday or take pleasure in the commonplace may be all we have left. “The question, maybe,” as cultural critic Megan O’Grady engaged with, “has never really been whether or not art can heal us but rather to what extent we have the courage to heal ourselves.”[7]

It is Emin’s visceral venture into the unknown, her artistic process akin to a healing touch, which brings a pleasure that exceeds pain and offers one the courage needed for an uncertain future. Like A Cloud of Blood, at once poignant and consoling, heavy yet tender, endeavors toward a humanist ideal of acceptance. Asserted through resistant lines of conviction, the painting’s confessional quality assists in bolstering Emin’s claim that “Honesty is beauty.”[8] Beholden to this picture’s beauty, which can paradoxically be expressed as a distracted contemplativeness, helps remove us from the everyday while simultaneously bringing it into greater focus. Our intimate encountering and animation of this supposed “dead matter,” complimented by an appreciative and empathetic viewing, enables the beholder to share in emotional time with this figure and adopt its calls for human betterment and relief for those in need.

While I have expressed that a sympathetic entering into an alternative world can birth new perspectives, growth, and understanding, the choice ultimately rests with the beholder to see this figure as a static, mute image or a living image. But in seeing the beauty of the latter, such a view can be adopted and directed toward the injustices and human sufferings found throughout our world. I, of course, acknowledge that my close reading may be viewed as speculative and subjective—although pure objectivity is just as illusory—but in my dialogue with this picture, perhaps this is what it wanted all along: to be seen, heard, and valued on account of a beholder’s inquiry, an attempt to understand its point of view and what it asks, or possibly, demands of us.

Notes

[1] Eric Michaud, “Self-Mimesis and Self-Portrait Gods,” in The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 49-93.

[2] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 57.

[3] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women,” YouTube, March 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MqFXvdYrJw.

[4] Hans Belting, “The Locus of Images,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 37-61.

[5] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 9-16, 65-67, 74-75, 80-82, 86-119.

[6] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

[7] Megan O’Grady, “The Artists Bringing Activism into and beyond Gallery Spaces,” The New York Times, October 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/t-magazine/art-activism-forensic-architecture.html.

[8] Sotheby’s. “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

Further Readings

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Elkins, James. “Marks, Traces, ‘Traits,’ Contours, ‘Orli,’ and ‘Splendores’: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 822–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344069.

Mitchell, W. J. T.. “What Do Pictures Want?,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28-56.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Vetlesen, Arne. A Philosophy of Pain. Translated by Jon Irons. United Kingdom: Reaktion Books, 2009.

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