The Secret Landscapes: On Not Pleasing Your Mother by Clara Bracks
Upswell Publishing
Clara Brack, daughter of Australian art royalty, audaciously reinvents her parents’ lives in The Secret Landscapes.
In an alternate reality, her father, renowned painter John Brack (Collins St 5pm), reveals his inner thoughts to a therapist, T. Her mother, overlooked cerebral artist Helen Maudsley (The listening lady), exposes her version of their life to V.
The landscape of art, its secrets and its cost to the helpmeet, subsumes this finely etched novelised memoir.
extract from The Secret Landscapes at PaperbarkWords blog:
The Secret Landscapes by Clara Brack
“Mum was brought up in a family where one kept one’s true thoughts to oneself. She was brought up in a family of secrecy – the secrecy of the grandmother she never knew, the secrecy of her father’s addiction to morphine, the secrecy of her father’s trauma from the war. I do not know how the impulse to secrecy is transmitted from one generation to the next, but I do know that I inherited my mother’s propensity for secrecy without being aware that I had. It amazed me that someone could come into a room and report on an incident on the way there, that they could name the feeling of shock, right at that moment, drawing attention to themselves. one kept one’s feelings to oneself, deferring to others.
The conditions of an artist’s work enter the work. An artist in a small studio will be restricted to painting small works. An artist with only charcoal to work with will be limited by the materials available. The psychological conditions also enter the work. Those who are accustomed to secrecy may not even realise that they are withholding some little detail, some fact that would make sense of the work. Reflecting on my own process of writing gives me some insight into an explanation of my mother’s process of painting.
This is my experience. You write something and then, thinking that you might have revealed too much, you hide some of it, leaving the vestige of what you wanted to say. You anticipate the guillotine striking you down: ‘You can’t say that. That is forbidden.’ You do not even think to say what is obvious, even something the reader needs to know to make sense of what you have written. You want the reader to know without telling them. You assume that something so deeply felt is libellous or incriminating. You hide it before knowing you have hidden it. You are withholding without knowing you are withholding. You strive to make sense with the fragments you permit yourself to write. It is painstaking, time-consuming. You think you are crafting a piece of writing when in fact you are ingeniously concealing something that cannot be said. You feel a constant frustration between the desire to say something and the impulse to conceal…
… It was suggested that this was a form of sabotage. As I understand it, ‘sabotage’ would involve taking the scissors to the work, savagely cutting it into pieces, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. This sabotage is creative. It involves a huge amount of laborious work, saying something and then retracting most of it, concealing what might be too private.
I recognise the sabotage in my mother’s work. An ornate letter ‘A’ floats across the painting called Know Thyself. ‘What is the letter A?’ I ask my mother.
‘Can’t you see? It’s the self.’
I wonder if A is for artist, the self that writes the letter A. It is not obvious to me. It is to my mother. I assume that, like me, she is leaving too much space between the dots for the reader to join up. She knows how the motifs floating across the canvas connect to the titles but is mystified that others cannot make out the connection.”
(The Secret Landscapes, from pages 164-166)
The Secret Landscapes will send its readers on a further journey to explore the art of Helen Maudsley and John Brack.
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