What Hands Can Do

"I always was drawing and writing, just as I am right now, sitting at table, pencil in hand. You remember my telling you I drew on a wall. I was older than three—I know that because we’d recently moved from my grandparents’ home to a 'house of our own.' It was early morning. Did I not have any paper? Did I want to draw on a larger scale? I can still sort of see that drawing, crayon, a child’s image of 'house,' with some trees at the side. And, always, when I think about that drawing, I am astonished that when my mother came downstairs into the living room and saw what I’d done, she didn’t yell at me. — “Nothing, Then Something, Then Nothing: Norma Cole and Sara Wintz in Correspondence,” Open Space, January 16, 2020

My earliest memory of Norma Cole: She plays horror legend Barbara Steele and I play her son River Phoenix. It is my first performance with the San Francisco Poets Theater in a play by Kevin Killian called Three On a Match. I was a recent undergrad of painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. It is 1993 or 1994 at Kiki, Rick Jacobsen’s storied queer art gallery on 14th Street. Of the many things I remember from that night, what stands out most was how Norma transformed herself into her character. From what I then assumed was a warm yet quietly reserved poet, Norma became an over-the-top diva in luxury tracksuit and bath towel turban, a comedic blending of Danielle Steele and Norma Desmond. In a play full of hams, that night Norma clearly stole the show.

Norma and I were in many of Kevin’s plays together, and it was through Kevin that we got to know each other. One of many attributes of Kevin’s genius was his gregarious ability to merge the communities of poets and artists in San Francisco in increasingly interesting ways. At the time, one could be an artist who also wrote, or a poet who made art, but there were few paths available for someone to excel in both worlds simultaneously. It felt like you had to pick a lane. I learned early from both Kevin and Norma to be wary of such divisions. It was always best to forge one’s own path with the work in whatever forms it may take.

Truly, Norma Cole’s work has taken many forms. There isn’t always a clear connective thread between her writing and her visual work, but it’s nonetheless there for anyone to find. In looking deeper into Norma’s work as a poet, visual artist, and translator, I can see that through her attentiveness, editing prowess, scholarly attributions, distillation of language and form, and the epistemological questioning, is a sly and fierce aura of play. At her disposal is a wandering, curious, and witnessing eye that is as critically sharp as any other tool. The relationship to the gesture, the line, the body as it inhabits a space, and the embodiment of other voices that is also one’s own voice is present in both her poetry and drawing.

Even as her creative work often circumnavigates uneasy subjects, there is a tendency not to over-inscribe past the primary gesture and direct mark. Yet the work tends to settle on moments of tender ambiguity and frequent joy while at the same time remaining free of sentiment. It made perfect sense to me that Norma’s background was in childhood education, working as a paraprofessional at the Second Community School when she first arrived in San Francisco from late 1977 to 1983. While there, she worked with first-, second-, and third-grade classroom teachers while also contributing to various administrative tasks. The open format of the school meant there was no principal, only a head teacher, which increased a sense of collaborative learning.

There is something about Norma’s marks, shapes, and lines that remind me of Rhoda Kellogg’s groundbreaking work in children’s artistic development. In the 1950s, Kellogg discovered that children of a certain age, regardless of economic, ethnic, or cultural background, go through the same stages of drawing development. All children tap into a deep universal well of pre-verbal coding (scribbles, patterns, placement, implied shapes, outlines, etc.) to navigate their understanding of the world before they develop a more pictorial style. These primary actions are not random or arbitrary but inscribed with oblique intention. Like her younger self drawing the house on the wall, it’s almost as if Norma is working through the memory of the new, taking something we thought we understood and making it curiously unfamiliar.

This quality of seeing in-between became my entry into reflecting upon Norma’s drawn universe as it covers three bodies of her artwork from the past thirty years: The Tahiti Series, The Newsprint Drawings, and The Notebooks.

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The Tahiti Series (1988) is a group of more than 25 untitled oil stick drawings on large sheets of paper, loosely based on photographs Cole took during a trip to the French Polynesian islands. They were made near the beginning of an emotionally eventful year in an urgent burst of activity over a period of a few days. Robert Duncan, Norma’s longtime mentor and friend, passed away around the time these drawings were made. Later in the year, Norma released her first chapbook, Mace Hill Remap, and published her poetry collection Metamorphopsia. In the context of such events, these drawings feel celebratory of fleeting life.

In these fervent drawings, bold gestural pencil lines and loosely rendered shapes of lush color come alive with movement. One can just make out the forms of stilted huts, palm leaves, trees, beaches, village churches, fishing nets, and fruit vendors, but these subjects seem to be a means to get to that feeling of being overwhelmed sensually through the painterly materiality of the drawing. Norma’s rough crayon lines refuse to stay still, filled with the rhythms of winds and ocean currents and the leaning perpendicularity of nature following the light and hue of the sun. Yet there is a strong sense of organization and control. In each drawing is a keen balance between activity and stasis.

I keep thinking of the way Norma’s drawings often correlate with my own experiences. I traveled to the Tahitian islands as a teenager just two years before she made these drawings. One image in particular—pink slanted lines on a wavy horizon with rough green shapes in the foreground demarcating a white sand beach, perhaps on Mo’orea or Raiatea—is dated on my eighteenth birthday. It instantly transports me to that formative trip, where, alone with just my parents and without much to do, I was given space to freely wander and reflect and be immersed in an overwhelmingly beautiful yet isolating place. What I recall most from my wanderings around those islands were the homemade shrines for the ancestral dead, often plotted out by rusted car parts and castoff materials organized with loving care in front of family homes. The intimate intertwining of life and death with the incredible beauty of the land was something I had never really experienced before, and Norma’s drawings took me back to these fertile moments buried in my psyche.

The idea of Tahiti may conjure ghosts of Paul Gauguin’s saturated desire. Visually, there’s a link here to the lines and colorations of Henri Matisse (he manifests again in the later work), as well as the formal geometries of Richard Diebenkorn. Paradises are often a projection of the change we wish to enable in ourselves. Norma once told me about contemplating Picasso’s lines as a child until she could make her own. I believe these artistic predecessors are doorways to finding her own path through the work. Perhaps in their urgent creation, she is acknowledging a dedicative respect for her own ancestral dead.

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The exhibition Time Silence and the Sky was a 2014 group survey at [2nd floor projects], a gallery run by Margaret Tedesco that featured rarely shown work. This is where I was introduced to the drawings and collages Norma was making at that time, among which were the Newsprint drawings. These are remarkable in many ways, but perhaps most significantly, they were developed following a stroke in 2002 that had paralyzed much of Norma’s right side, affecting her speech as well as her gait. In the intervening years she had to train herself how to write and draw with her non-dominant left hand. The first published drawings after her stroke were the preliminary sketches included in the catalog for her interactive installation Collective Memory at the California Historical Society in 2005. The Newsprint drawings feel like a return to painting on a more intimate and immediate scale.

“I wanted to keep working the way I always had, so I had to work with what my hand could do,” Norma explained to me. Within this limitation, she came to a renewed awareness of the key to her early artistic development: drawing a line that is her own. The juxtaposition of styles between 1988 and 2014 in the exhibition were a revelation, not of contrast so much as continuum. Her artistic tenacity of strong lines and gestures are present in both works, but the rich sensuousness of the earlier work gives way to a more restrained mysteriousness in the later work. The drawings may have been made with two different hands, but both styles were very much uniquely Norma.

These later drawings—inspired by art and literature and the life that happens in between—are more austere in their decision making than the Tahiti series. There are figures, portraits, and objects, and other nods to genre painting rendered minimally in deft lines and quick smudges of color. Freshly immediate and present in the observance of compositional detail, the pieces nonetheless refuse to articulate plainly what we are seeing. Put aside all the noise of a restless gesture. What is the essential line? I imagine Norma thinking. There is clearly an allowance of the hand’s newly found voice to express how it sees on its own terms, and to give that voice a surreal sense of space.

Perhaps most of us can draw a line, but not everyone can embed a kind of consciousness into the lines we draw. For example, consider the presence manifested in the drawing OMG Matisse, a standout work from the exhibition. It may appear to be a very simple and direct drawing, yet there is an engaging aloofness to it that shares the strength of Matisse’s work. Matisse’s drawings are often held up as art class exemplars of exquisite and seemingly effortless line quality, but there is little consideration for how many hours he put into finding the line that was his own. Or the ways he had to repeatedly discover alternative working methods to make those signature elegant lines, such as employing long sticks and, later, scissors, when his own hands and body failed him. And yet when we see a Matisse drawing, what we notice most is how the subject immediately comes to life.

In OMG Matisse, two simple pencil lines demarcate a figure and face while a green line connects the figure to a roughly shaded red shape that hovers over the figure’s head. There is a body language in the line that reads feminine to me, as well as an aura of shy grace. A near-effortless Madonna perhaps, or maybe a devout Muslim woman. Does it matter? This figure repeats in Norma’s work as a kind of totem for gentle refusal.

Right away I knew that out of all the drawings in the show, this was the one I desired most. Much to my surprise, at nearly the same time that I purchased it, I learned that Norma acquired a painting of mine (aptly titled Refusal) that showed at Margaret Tedesco’s space a few years earlier. Both of our pieces were made around the same time that each of us was exploring a new voice of the hand, and I take pleasure in that mutual exchange. I wake up to Norma’s drawing every morning, and like the Mona Lisa’s fleeting smile, it still beguiles me.

I have lovingly nicknamed it “The Virgin of the Heat Lamp.” Its invocation of Matisse in the title and the text shorthand of OMG suggest a kind of blushing, or embarrassment. I am reminded of the faceless figurations of the religious mosaics Matisse designed for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France. And of the story of Monique Bourgeois, who had been Matisse’s nurse and model before she joined the Dominican Order and persuaded him to help design their chapel, which he did out of love for her. Is it she who is blushing?

Norma lived for a time not far from Vence, where she gave birth to her son Jesse, and knows the chapel well. Although an interesting connection, she lets me know my read of the work was not her intent. She is not always forthcoming with what meaning her drawings convey, but sometimes we as viewers can’t help but project meaning onto them nonetheless, wrong as we might be. That those projections occur is an occasionally pleasing—if understandably irksome— byproduct of the artist’s expression. Could the OMG invoked be some more personal revelation? Perhaps that the line of the hand, the strongest of Matisse’s expressive qualities, is all that is necessary to bear witness to art? I will keep wondering. For me, OMG Matisse is the essence of medieval Russian iconography rendered with three lines and some change.

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Norma’s Drawings (Further Other Book Works, 2020) collects from two recent bodies of work: Later Newsprint drawings and, more centrally, The Notebook Series detailing drawings from a spiral-bound square notebook of sketches and notes made between 2015 and 2016. The Notebook series can be read as an oblique narrative of what would become a tumultuous year nationally. A year in which repercussions were still being felt in 2020 at the time Drawings was published. In her introduction, Mary Ann Caws succinctly outlines the contradictory impulses of “deal[ing] with a narrative that may not want to be one.” But in the open invitation of Norma’s work, we are left to navigate the sequence of the images and read them as serialized moments in time.

The first drawing suggests a point of beginning. A familiar looking opened box from Amazon with 1AD written on the folded flap can be read as a firm statement of personal intent. There is no lineage or prologue to what the artist did before. We will only be moving forward. Sharply observational yet rendered with curious exploration, these are not preliminary sketches for later refinement. Forget what you think you know. This is what the work is now. Indeed, the Notebook series as presented in Drawings is the quiet affirmation of the terms of expression of Norma’s hand.

There present again is an urgent attention to the moment, a quick study perhaps, a killing (or filling) of time in between conversations, a pivot from one form of language to another, or a seepage of the unheard conversation made as the line is drawn. It is possible that these contoured explorations are not so much about the quotidian as a leap into the interstitial between what is physically there and what is metaphysically inferred. These pages seem to be telling us that, on the surface, the daily life of a poet may not seem altogether exceptional, but there are always layers and nuance to even the barest of pages.

The objectivity of the drawings as we are brought deeper into the series becomes un-tethered from their still lives and open up playfully into the zeitgeist of our own. The lines deftly scribbled and scrawled leap out sometimes by a forceful musicality, the rhythms of architecture and travel, fleeting observances, half thoughts left hanging, figures filled or bereft of emotion, and the dreamlike surrealism of uncertain dogs, dogged as they may be by uncertainty.

The noted voices of poets and journalists increase as a sense of commitment and vigor in the drawing veers away from the familiar towards the remarkably obtuse—and ultimately the tragic. The empty lines of newspaper grids read in cafes start to become depictions of actual events. Invocations of the late Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite (“the light under the trees” and later, “We only remember the dancing”) around images of distressed but resilient figures, palm trees, and a lone panopticon in a barren landscape suggest a resistance to uplift power to a state that only inflicts trauma. The final few drawings carry the heavy burdens of Jean Francois Leroy, Diamond Reynolds, and Rekeyia Scott, who bore witness to the horrors of state and police violence at home and abroad that have ultimately forced a reckoning with which we are still grappling.

Norma reminds us that we too must bear witness to these acts. Art is not outside of these events but tied directly to them. There is no looking away. The raw naked lines in the notebooks may arc ungracefully, but they are not here to render us a rainbow. An unpracticed hand with the sharpness of mind creates for itself a new language that is not so different from the surprises and pleasures of crafting poetry, even if crafted from painful experiences.

I keep thinking about the first drawing Norma told me she had to make with her left hand to show the doctors where her body was while having her stroke. I think about how that drawing in the uncertain fear of that moment must have later informed her relationship to her body and ultimately foresaw where her art practice would go: The limitations enforced on the body and the tremendous liberation in finding her own visual form. The marks artists make do not have to illustrate the experienced life, because making them is life experienced. All the words, thoughts and memories that conveyed Norma to the moment of the drawing’s execution will convey us as viewers to ever-newer experiences in our minds. The gift she gave herself to keep forging that singular path is the gift she gives to us all.