My Grandmother, The Dragon

Point, Click, Drag. I am punching away at my grandmother’s computer. It is an ancient thing, but far too advanced for her. I am at her apartment, documenting her life’s work: Art. I snap digital photos of her paintings, download them onto the ancient computer, and play with them until they do the actual artwork justice, so that we can put them in a book to sell. These paintings document her life in a way that words never could: French-Quebec debutante, to art school, to art school drop out, to mother, to alcoholic, to AA and more. They speak of our family, our friends, our country, our politics and more. My grandmother usually paints faces and portraits, in oil or charcoal. I stare at the screen and brighten and crop my brothers, my parents, my grandparents, my cousins, various politic leaders, my own face and her own self portraits. I point click and drag to try and tell our story. It’s hard: a lot gets lost somewhere in the space between the painting and when the picture turns up on the computer: colour, brightness, depth, voice, character and the message behind the paint. Maybe that is because it is something hand crafted and with a lifetime of experience wrapped in it just cannot speak in a time of technology and flashy conveniences. Just like my grandmother.

While I click away, this woman who lived this life has fallen asleep and is snoring ferociously on the couch during her daily routine of yelling at the anchors on CNN. She is so French: when she can’t paint a picture, she paints her own face with make up even though she rarely goes out; she naps through the afternoon and most of the evening; and she smokes all day, the smoke furrowing out her nose like a dragon. She sleeps in a cloud of this smoke, with a handmade ashtray full of butts with big fat pink lipstick marks on the filters. But I know this old woman is fierce. She had battled life with zeal, painted her way through hard times – divorce, alcoholism, just making ends meat - and managed to raise my mother and uncles into amazing people. She is wild and strong and doesn’t take crap from anyone and wears a diamond pendant everyday that says “Oh Shit”. And much like her paintings, her story is lost somewhere in the space between her memories and her words. The beauty of it is that her paintings will always speak for her, just like they always have.
Her pictures are fascinating, like her life. While something gets lost between the glint in her eye as she paints, and what is there when the paint dries, there is still a lot to be said for the finish product. There are paintings that are beautifully life-like, such as painting of my mother, kneeled down for her nightly prayers, about age six. The carved wood frame of the mirror, the embroidery of the ataman she rests on, the shades of blonde and brown in her little pig-tails – it could be a photograph. If I couldn’t touch the painting with my own hand, and run it along the textured paints of my mother’s pink nightgown, I might not believe it to be hand painted. It has been passed along in our family, and is highly cherished. I think this is funny considering no one in my family goes to church or prays, and I am pretty sure my grandmother is the only atheist who demands to be taken to confession. But that’s another story.

Her charcoal sketches are also stunningly true to life. As I stare at simple sketches of my brother and I, both around the age of three, I can’t fathom the talent it would take to create such a thing. Since charcoal is black, she used negative shading to show my then-blonde hair. Each curl is defined and separate (oh to return to the hair of my childhood). How on earth can someone hold her hand so steady with something as smudgy and dirty as charcoal? I mean, my god woman, the stuff is wood, burnt to such a crisp so that no wood actually remains. She makes something beautiful out of something that the rest of us use to cook our hotdogs over. But that’s my grandmother.

I turn back to the dull screen of the old computer. While she has talent to paint real life, there are other paintings that are wrought with influences from the 60’s and the various revolutions in her era. The wild, flamboyant leadership of Peirre Trudeau might have had something to do with that, considering my grandmother’s French-Quebec heritage. My grandmother was no hippy – far from it. But she was a forward-thinker. I remember my mother telling me about growing up in Burnaby, BC, in the 50’s, and a neighbour coming by asking my grandmother to sign a petition to force the new black family out of the neighbourhood. My grandmother chased her away – not just off the property, but all the way down the street – with a broom and a frying pan. She deserves to wear the “oh shit” pin, that’s for sure.

She loves painting faces of all kinds, as well as birds, boats, and the ocean. But mostly faces. When she looks at someone, she sees their story, not their face. And she paints the story, each one with a deep and personal history to it. While maybe that story is lost to me, it’s not lost to the face in the picture, and its not lost to my grandmother. While she is losing lots of things – her keys, her remote, her ability to walk – she has yet to lose her memory. Sometimes, when she can’t remember exactly what happened, she pulls out a painting, and it slowly comes back. How she can recall names and places and events and emotions out of someone’s face, I will never know. The story is mixed in with the colours and spread outside the lines; its hidden in the shading of someone’s eyes, or tucked in the corners of someone’s mouth. But one thing is for certain: the story is there.

I look back at her again. Her own face tells quite the story. It’s as fantastically colourful as her paintings, with deeply carved laugh lines by her eyes, but don’t be fooled – there’s a handful of scowl lines in there too. There is no face more terrifying to me than my grandmother’s disapproving one. She can, and will, hold the look of death for as long as it takes – minutes, hours. Decades. And yet, while she never baked me cookies and calls me “The Rat” (for sneaking food from the pantry while she’s sleeping), she has taught me how to paint, how to look at art, how to be intelligently chaotic when painting (and in life), and how to take on a goal with ferocious ambition. I am thankful for these things. Although cookies would be nice. Speaking of cookies, I slowly start to open a bag of Chips-Ahoy as quietly as possible. The crinkling echoes over the CNN anchor’s ranting, and I hold my breath.

She stirs and snorts. She opens her purple-veiled eyes wide and remembers where she is and that someone is inside her smoky cave. She relaxes when she sees it’s me.
“ I fell asleep. Why didn’t you wake me?”
I turn back to the computer screen and smile. Point, Click, Drag.
“Everyone knows you don’t wake a sleeping dragon, Nana”
She roars with laughter.