[Transcript] The Alchemy of Blood: Artist Talk

A conversation with Suleika Jaouad & Anne Francey

Jill Kearney: Hello, and welcome to ArtYard. We are an art exhibition space, theater and artist residency. And our mission is to serve as an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. Four years ago, at the start of Covid, a friend reached out to me to ask if we might have space in our residency for John and Suleika. Covid had shuttered everything and our spaces were in need of a purpose.

That was the beginning of an unfolding, joyful experience that brought them back to us several times during the wild adventures of their ensuing years. When Suleika had a relapse and I saw the beautiful paintings she managed to produce under the most difficult circumstances, I reached out to see if she would consider a show.

Suleika said yes—with an asterisk. What if we combined her work with the paintings and ceramic shields Anne Francey, her mother, an accomplished visual artist and Suleika’s caregiver had produced while pregnant with Suleika and during two bone marrow transplants as totemic acts of protection for her child? Suleika, as you all likely know, is a Juilliard trained musician, bestselling New York Times columnist and author, giver of TED Talks, subject of the film American Symphony and now visual artist. Anne Francey is a visual artist who works with painting, drawing, ceramic and video. She has exhibited in Switzerland, Tunisia and the U.S., and designs and manages collaborative art projects with large scale participation. She's a Fulbright Scholar whose most recent project, 1001 Briques, has involved 550 participants in the creation of a large mural installed on a small public plaza in the heart of Tunis, Tunisia.

Carmen Radley will moderate this conversation. Carmen is the editor of the Isolation Journals, the community that Suleika founded as a living archive of human creativity and connection. We are, all of us, lucky and unlucky in life, and art has a way of integrating these polarities. As you have already seen in the conversation in the gallery between these two sets of arresting artworks, now we are the lucky few who get to hear another conversation between mother and daughter, survivor and protector, artist and artist.

It is my pleasure to welcome Suleika Jaouad, Anne Francey, and Carmen Radley to the stage.

Suleika Jaouad: And we forgot to introduce my emotional support Legume. This is lentil, who has been my faithful studio assistant for the last three months while in residence at ArtYard, so it felt fitting to bring her on too.

Carmen Radley: She will definitely be quiet and curled in this lap the entire time, as she has been for the whole time she's been a member of your family. As, Jill said—what a beautiful introduction. First of all, Jill, thank you for having us today and for bringing such an incredible, incredible show to this place. It's really astonishing. It's such an honor to moderate this talk. As Jill said, I'm Carmen. I'm Suleika’s friend and collaborator at the Isolation Journals. And I'm so excited to talk to you all today.

This conversation is going to be about an hour long. We're going to talk for about 45 minutes between us, and then we're going to have some audience questions. We're going to have some note cards there. If you were at the show last night and a question occurred to you, you can write it on the note card now, or if something occurs during the talk, you can write it as we progress. About thirty minutes in, I'll make a little announcement. Please pass your note cards to the end. They'll collect them and I'll be able to address some of your questions to our gorgeous artists today. So with that, we can get started. You know, we're here to talk about “The Alchemy of Blood.”And I wanted to ask you Suleika, to talk a little bit about the name of the show and, you know, how y'all came up with that and tease out some of its implications for us?

Suleika: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. So the word alchemy is one of my very favorite words in the English language. And when we were brainstorming a name for the Isolation Journals, we thought about calling it the Alchemy Journals. And the reason it's one of my very favorite words is that that process of alchemy of, in ancient times transforming metals into gold, has so many applicabilities, in our everyday life, but I think especially when the ceiling caves in on you and you can no longer assume structural stability.

When I first got sick, at 22, I really struggled in that first year to figure out what to do with myself when confined to a hospital bed. I was at an age where it seemed like everyone was just launching into the world and starting their careers and going on dates and traveling the world and all of the other big and small milestones of early adulthood. And in a culture that is so obsessed with productivity and with résumé virtues, I didn't know what my worth was when my sole goal, my soul preoccupation was survival. And so that idea of alchemy as one that's been modeled by a long lineage of artists and writers and creatives who found themselves, for one reason or another, confined to a bed.

And it was during those early months when my mom gifted me a copy of Frida Kahlo's diary, and I was familiar with Frida Kahlo’s story, of course. And the accident that had left her bedridden around the same age that I was. And her own mother had given her a lap easel, which led her to paint these self-portraits from bed that, of course, have made her one of the most famous artists of all time.

And so and learning about her and learning about Matisse, who,when old and infirm and bedridden, began attaching a paintbrush to a pole and reimagining the ceiling of his bedroom as the ceiling of a cathedral and painting on it. I began to think about what role alchemy might have in the confines of my own bed, and so that led me to writing, and it led me to painting.

And it led my mom through her own alchemical process. And really it's core not to the experience of illness. But that gap, to paraphrase—what’s his name? You know what I'm about to say. We have a mind meld. Stimulus and response.

Carmen: Viktor Frankl.

Suleika: Thank you, Viktor Frankl. That gap between stimulus and response, where you have the agency to choose how you want to respond to those circumstances. And, Mom, I'll let you speak to the blood part.

Anne Francey: Hi, everybody. So let's talk about the blood part. In the title? It's difficult to talk about it because it's at the same time obvious and then it has deep implications in terms of the art, of how you put it into your artistic expression and creativity. And it's something that might happened between all of us is how we came about putting creativity not in the center, but definitely being part of a conversation around Suleika’s illness the first time and the second time doing the recurrence. And how it was essential to us to feel a little better, to exist around what was happening to her.

And as a mother, obviously the blood part is something that's essential, that stays forever. And how do you react to your child being so sick? And I maybe I'll start with my story of the importance of art, which to me, art is alchemy. Right? Alchemy between life and what we have to say, what we want to say and express about the world and how we put it into any medium. So when Suleika was first hospitalized, she was for a long time in the first hospital, and I was staying with friends a few blocks down and would walk down every day from the hospital room at night or at the end of the day wondering what would make me feel better in relationship to what was happening to her.

And I could not find any answer. Seeing friends was too much. Going to the movies was too loud. Reading was too difficult, and I found out that every day I was walking down that avenue, I would feel a little better. Like a breath of being lifted. And after a few days, I noticed what was happening. I was passing by a gallery that was selling old Buddha sculptures, beautiful old Buddha sculptures, and I realized that it was seeing them without even thinking about it that made me feel better. Certainly the beauty of it and possibly the spirituality. So I started going to the Met every day and after staying with her in her room, and then just looking at one painting each day. And it came to me as a surprise that art, even when you're facing very dramatic situations, is possibly the one thing that could make you feel better.

And if you use it, you know, in your own expression, definitely it's going to have also an answer to some of the questions and the pain around these blood connections.

Carmen : I love that story so much, and I love how—I’ve heard you say that you thought for a long time that art was a luxury. You would be in your studio listening to all the things happening in the world and thinking, this is such a luxury that I'm doing this. And actually, it wasn't a luxury. It was essential. And, you had that practice long before, you know. So, like, I got sick as we know, this gorgeous fourteen foot paintings from when you were pregnant with her that you made thirty-six years ago, which is just—

Suleika: Thirty-five. [Laughter.]

Carmen: That year of illness didn’t count. [Laughs.] So I wanted to ask you about where those paintings have been. Can you talk about where they lived, both literally and figuratively in your mind, and what it was like to rencounter them in the gallery on the wall after so long?

Anne: So the thirty-five-years-old paintings were rolled up in my storage space in my studio because they are so large, I cannot keep them in my studio, so I have rarely seen them. I showed them a few times after they were produced and a few other times, in my gallery in Hudson, and that was it. I just saw them sometimes as slides. So it came quite as a surprise to see them once again here. They came rolled up, and then they came with the stretchers, and they were stretched right on the premises.

And of course, I was nervous because I thought, “Well, oh, you know, youth paintings, maybe they have weaknesses.” I was afraid to expose their, their aesthetic weaknesses. So it came as a surprise that they were about what was happening at the time, which was a soon to be mother who was at an artist residency for three months. And I had just gotten married, and I went there by myself. So it was my way to affirm that, yes, I could be married and I can be pregnant, but I'm going to keep being an artist.

So I started making these large paintings. So that's where they have been. And now they just reappeared. And they are so linked to all our story. And to Suleika, she’s almost in these paintings.

Carmen: Yeah. That nascent life.

Suleika: Well, and you returned what was it? For the first six months of my life.

Anne: So then I returned the following year, when Suleika was like a few months… she was six months old. And one of her artist’s spouses was taking care of Suleika while I was painting. And I think that's a beginning of her being exposed to art. And I remember her touching sculptures and things and people saying, “Be careful, she's going to, you're going to turn her into an artist.” So it was her very early exposure to art.

Carmen: That idea of coming back to those paintings so long ago. You probably remember this—we had a studio visit with Dani Shapiro, the writer, and she said that, in writing a book, she had gone back to her journals from that time. And she said, “Instead of remembering myself, I was encountering myself at that age, and I was able to do a dance with her.” And I wonder if it felt like that at all, that you reencountered yourself as a as a younger person, seeing them up there in this conversation with these other works.

Anne: I think so. And I encountered also all these questions we all have, I think even as children, certain parts of us that we have so many questions about, and when we reencounter them later on, we say, “Of course, this is actually the core of who I am.” And that's what happened there. Also the need to work very large, which I haven't done since then because I haven't had such a large studio, it makes me want to go back to there. There. And, yeah, we are encountering all the emotions also of the time, and these questions and the affirmations and the potentials and knowing that even though—I would share my age, because I feel like this age thing is ridiculous, it's okay. It's okay to be older. Okay. Yes. Okay. So now that I'm 68, it's still all wide open, and I want to keep working the same way and maybe being even maybe letting aside some of the doubts and the questions and let it be. And let the gesture and the information and the paint and the color and the beautiful thing about discovering my daughter is an artist, and the conversation between us—all of us is ahead of us. And it's beautiful.

Carmen: I do want to ask you about what it was like to watch Suleika take up painting in the hospital. Did it feel like she was returning? You used to do little art classes, as I've been told in your in your attic studio for kids in Saratoga Springs, for school kids, and Suleika always talks about going up after school and just playing around. Did that feel like a familiar person emerging, or did it feel like a completely new thing?

Anne: No, I’m used to my daughter having so many talents. I will say that with modesty. So. She was, you know, she got into it. She had this natural way to draw when she was little in my art classes, because I would teach five-year-olds how to draw from observation. You can do that. You just show them simple shapes. And she had this beautiful, expressive line. And then she wanted to become a dancer and a gymnast and a vet. So when she started to paint, it seemed there was no question she was going to be able to do what she wanted to do with it.

And yet the conversation we had together—she would call me at night. Sometimes I would leave the hospital at around 9 p.m., and then she would text at eight in the morning—because I would stay at friends—and say, “Hey, mom, when are you coming back?” And it’s like, “Okay, I’ll be there at nine.

And we would talk about her paintings and help her sometimes take decisions, and that was amazing because we had this focus on something that was apart from the illness.

Suleika: And I’ll just add that I think one of the hardest things about illness, whether you're the person in the hospital bed or you're the person sitting in the caregiver's chair, is this total ceding of control—to what's happening, to the test results, to the ever-changing treatment protocols. But wrapped up in that is also a sense that you've lost your identity, you've lost that throughline of self. What was so wonderful about starting to make these paintings wasn't just the painting themselves. It was the conversations that we got to have together, because I felt like I was back in the attic of our pink house in Saratoga, taking painting lessons with you.

And rather than talking about whatever complication, or side effect or terrifying test result had come back, we were talking about scale, and you were teaching me how both to feel that sense of liberation that you need to feel to follow that through line of intuition on the page or on the canvas, but also how to make it better.

And I kept saying to you, especially with a writer's mind, “How do I edit this? How do I know it's done?” And those conversations made me feel like my very favorite thing in the world, which is a student. But it also made me feel like a human beyond just being a cancer patient. And I hope it made you feel beyond being a mother and a caregiver, like the extraordinary artist that you are.

Anne: Thank you. It's actually maybe the biggest present that someone who is sick or someone that you care for, for whom you want so much to be able to do something and often there's not much you can do and the powerlessness is hard to accept. So as a mother, of course we don't want that. It was, in a way, maybe the biggest present you could give me, of feeling like we could have this conversation about something that made you happy and that also, you know, made sense to the day. And it's much better than bringing soup and smoothies, more essential, much more, you know, conversation inducing.

Also what I want to talk about is the effects of it. Suleika was working on her paintings, and then we would put them up on the wall, one after the other, after the other, and at some point, she had some also some vanilla-scented candles, I think.

Suleika: They were LED candles. Yeah.

Carmen: Although the nurses did walk by and say that it was terrifying because they would look in and it looked like the whole room was on fire.

Anne: Anyway, so what happened is that it became almost a problem is that people who are working in the hospital, who would come into her room, did not want to leave because it was such a beautiful atmosphere. I swear. So they would come, whether they would clean the floor or the nurses, they were hanging out in her room forever. And some of them said that it just so wonderful for us to come to a different. It was not about illness. The room was about what the paintings were saying or your creativity and your willingness and desire tto express. And that just made more than mom and visitors happy, but everybody at the hospital could feel that. And that was really amazing to witness.

Carmen: So those hospital paintings, there were, I don't know, ten or eleven of them that you did at the time. And they were small—maybe twelve by eighteen or something like that. And you've reimagined them in this huge format, not on watercolor paper, but on a completely new canvas. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like to  translate those into, from what they were the original studies into what they became and that we get to see in this gallery?

Suleika: Before I talk about what they became, I need to give a shout ou, to two people. Behida, you're going to hate me for this. But when I learned of my recurrence, we immediately packed up, we rehomed our two dogs, which was the hardest thing, and we went back to New York. We were staying at a friend's home close to the hospital, and my friend Behida and my friend Liz showed up with a giant professional easel, high-quality watercolor paper brushes, and paints. And I'm paraphrasing here, but Behida said to me, You get to do whatever you want that nourishes and feeds your soul. And painting was something that she had returned to, and gifted to me on so many levels. And so I had this very professional, intimidating set up in the living room, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

But I had this dream, and it was the first of many night terrors that I had during that period. I had a little snake ring I think that Liz had brought me, and it was a little too tight for my finger, and I took it off, right before bed. And in my dream, the snake ring was around my neck, and it was a little too tight. And I thought to myself, I need to take it off. And then I realized that there was no way for me to get it above my head, of course, and I started to have this panic attack. I woke up and it was maybe two a.m., and I felt like I couldn't breathe, and I was drenched in a cold sweat. I got up, and I went to the easel and that was my very first painting. It was this sort of self-portrait of a semi-autobiographical figure with a snake coiled around her head. Of course, I decided I hated it and wanted to throw it away. Behida told me, “Absolutely not.” And so I put it to the side and then gave it to her because, that would that painting would be in a dumpster somewhere were it not for her.

But those early paintings were really, in some ways, a process of transcription. I was having these medication-induced hallucinations, including a hallucination of a very, very creepy, French schoolboy named George who sat in my room for about two days. But painting them was a way of defanging what otherwise would have felt so terrifying. And the act of recording them on paper and then starting to play with them and to reimagine them, I began to enjoy doing a kind of dance with the surreal and to feel this sense of possibility, and even like I was traveling, despite being in such a confined room. But I had always imagined them in large scale because they loomed so large in my imagination.

And so the original studies were quite small because I was making them from bed. A therapist at the hospital had brought me some kind of cardboard that I could use to kind of work from. And I had my little station set up on my hospital side table with my paint brushes and my pants. But I'd always wanted to see them live in large format. And so when I had the opportunity to come here and to do this exhibit, it would have been far easier to just show the original small paintings. But they felt incomplete to me. They felt like they weren't in the format that they were intended to be.

And so, with the help of Elsa, who is part of the ArtYard family, and had experimented with this technique of treating cradled plywood with a mix of gesso and matte varnish, I found these very large plywood canvases. And in a slightly terrifying timeline of two-and-a-half months, I decided to try to recreate them in the form that I'd always imagined for them.

I just want to add, you know, aside from working in a medium I never worked in before or had been trained in and trying to do it on this short timeline, my biggest source of angst was the physical stamina that painting in large format would require of me. I'm two years out from that transplant. I still undergo every three months something called the donor lymphocyte infusion with my brother's cells, and I spent a lot of the last two years horizontal on a couch or in a bed. And so truly, I had no idea how this is going to happen. I was lucky to be in residency here at ArtYard, and I made myself a little bed than the floor. I called it my hamster’s nest, my creative hamster’s nest.

And so in the beginning, the progress was quite halting. I would stand up and work for 30 minutes or an hour, then lie down, then get back up, then lie down. But the extraordinary thing about doing these large paintings is, in some ways, it's been a kind of physical therapy, because in the last few weeks I've been working long hours.

Carmen: Too long. [Laughs.]

Suleika: And I look at my phone and realized that four or five hours have passed, and I haven't had to lie down once. So it's really, yeah, thank you. It feels like such a full circle moment and so many levels to be here, to see these large scale works and the format that they were intended, to be with all of you and, the wonderful humans who made painting even something that was possible, because all of it felt so tenuous and precarious right up until last Sunday, when I finished the last of the paintings.

Carmen: Truly extraordinary. I want to take just a minute break to sat that if you want to go ahead and pass your note cards—if you had a question, you want to pass it to the edge. Some volunteers will come by and collect those, and we'll be able to, ask those in just a few minutes. One question I wanted to raise is that your mother was with you daily in the hospital as you were doing these original paintings, but Anne, you had gone to Tunisia. You returned to Tunisia to work on a project that you had imagined before Suleika’s relapse called 1001 Bricks. If y'all haven't seen Anne's Instagram this community art project, it's absolutely beautiful. Different groups in the community have made these bricks that she installed as a map of the city in an abandoned courtyard, and it has transformed the space and the most gorgeous way.

But I wanted to ask what it was like to leave after Suleika had gotten to a place where you felt stable. But emotionally, I imagine that that's a tension. And as a caregiver and an artist, how to balance those things that pull you in opposite directions. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Anne: It was not easy to leave. Suleika was still not feeling very well. I had lots of guilt. I asked for Suleika’s kind of a permission about it, and of course she said, “Go Mom, go Mom,” and I'm still feeling a little funny about having been gone so much to create this project, but at the same time there was this necessity to do it. Maybe because of a theme of—it was about bricks and building and rebuilding, and there was something that felt inevitable about it, and almost like an obsession for me that I needed to get it done, despite everything.

But no, it was not easy. Yet I felt like maybe it was important for Suleika—not that she needs me or my mother's advice anymore, or my role model anymore. She's who she is, and she will be no matter what. But it was important to affirm that being as well, that being a mother is also being a woman and an artist. And I'm always thinking about, this song by a French singer called Camille that she sings in this movie that some of you may have seen, that’s called Corsage. What she says—and it stayed with me and I was playing it on a loop—is  something like, “In order to be a woman, you must betray your children at times.” And I thought about, it and I thought about it, and I said, “Yes, my daughter needs needed me as a caregiver. She does not anymore as much, but she needs also to see that, even for herself, we are allowed to be something else than mothers. And it's part of being a mother is to be who you are.” So I don't know if I answered right.

Carmen: We had that beautiful conversation a couple of years ago where—as part of the Isolation Journals, Suleika had an advice column, Dear Susu, and we interviewed you, with caregiver questions. And a mother had asked, “How do I help my adult child become independent again after cancer?” And you said, “Believe me, your child wants to be independent. Your thirty-two-year-old wants to live in their own apartment. They want to go do this. And it's interior work to understand that that sometimes that need is your need to be there for the child—especially the adult child's need. It's a different time of life.

I had an experience that—you know, last night there was the opening and it was so celebratory and so joyful. And the paint, the colors and the paintings were so vibrant and beautiful, and it just felt like such a celebration. And I went into the gallery earlier by myself, which I hope that you all get that opportunity. The joy and the celebration is still there, the color, the vibrancy. But you're reminded of what it what those pieces were born of. And what I thought of was that Robert Frost quote that we've talked about a lot before: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

And I thought about this in terms of this art—how all of these pieces are so clearly born of your own surprise, your own experimentation. You're both so experimental through a daily creative practice that leads you where it's going to lead you, and very intuitive. And also, the vulnerability creating from that place of curiosity, exploring these things that are very challenging to explore and maybe challenging to expose. I was wondering if you could talk about vulnerability and exploration in your creative practices.

Suleika: So I feel like this is something you've modeled my entire life. My mom is very mischievous. Her favorite holiday is April Fool's Day. We have a big pranking culture in our family, but there's always been this sense of playfulness and this invitation to experiment and to make a big mess. I remember in these art classes that you taught when we were little—you would describe how there's an age where children are so free, they make giant, glorious messes. They're finger painting. And then suddenly this little germ of self-consciousness enters the psyche. And you notice one child drawing a stick figure a certain way and the other children looking over and suddenly drawing their figures the exact same way.

You've modeled that so beautifully, to revel in the mess, to embrace the happy accidents. And anytime I was painting something, I would say, “This is a disaster. I don't think it can be salvaged.” You always say to me, “That's going to be the most interesting part of the painting. That's where the energy is going to be.”

Anne: I said that to you a few days ago by the way.

Suleika: Yes, you did. And so, you know, one small example of that is when my husband, Jon and I were first, in residency at ArtYard in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, my mom came to visit me. And right before she was leaving, I said, “Hey, you know, those boxes and boxes and boxes of health insurance bills and medical records that we have in the attic?” And she was like, “Yes.” And I said, “Could you bring them?” And she was like, “Sure.” And we decided sort of for fun, to make this experimental video piece together in the Frenchtown Cemetery.

An easy response would have been, “That's incredibly inconvenient. I'm about to leave. I don't want to haul ten boxes out of storage when there's no clear plan for them. And there's no goal or outcome in mind for this.” But you've always, not only been game to play and to spend an afternoon doing something, even if there's no end goal in mind. You've really been the one who taught me that.

So we made this video without really thinking about where it would be shown or if it would be shown. What I didn't know at the time is that I had relapsed already, and so that video is here. I think that that ability to create without expectation to play with a new medium, without knowing or caring if you're going to be a good artist or a bad artist, that core belief that we're all deeply creative, and that creativity is the gift that we have access to, and that when you're most uncomfortable, when you feel most laid bare, that's usually when the interesting stuff is taking place—all of that are things that I've learned from you.

Anne: I was going to go back to the making of the video. Suleika called me with this request to bring all the medical files, but initially we were going to make a collage. So I took also a huge box of glues and colors. And then so we put it all on the table, and something was not working. So just to say how you could also have an idea and it became something very different. And there is a very simple principle to this, which, one can apply to everything in life is: Observe what's happening. So you take from what's here, and what can you do with it? So we let it flow. We had no idea that it would be an insect, if you notice. All of these things happen and it was a matter of getting the insect off the pile of papers or saying, what does it tell me, what do all these accidents or incidents and all these happenings can teach me about or teach us about what we want to say, who we are?

I almost see it like the Rorschach tests—you know, these psychological tests where you are given an ink stain and then the psychologist asks you to do an interpretation. And by your interpretation, they can tell you about yourself. And to me that's what, in a way, our life is about. If we are here to observe what's happening, we can learn about what we want to say deep inside. And that's what happened with us. Between the two of us, we would have one idea to the next. It led us to the cemetery and then the wind blowing the sheets and all these things.

And even last week I was asking Suleika, “Should we remove the section where we see my shadow filming?”—which is a very no-no. When you make a video, you should not see the person who filmed it. She said, “No, that's part of it.” So that's what you are teaching everybody to embrace, including the vulnerabilities, that things are here, and what can we do with it? And that's your specialty, I think.

Suleika: So I’ll also just add so we had thousands of these health records and medical bills laid out very neatly in a path going up the road in the middle of the Frenchtown Cemetery with objectively quite personal information on these documents. And there's a giant gust of wind arrived out of nowhere and blew and scattered the documents everywhere.

And I was panicking and my instinct was, stop the camera, we have to collect all of these. And you said, no, it's beautiful. And so, you know, to any of you Frenchtown residents who like to walk in the cemetery, please return any stray health records that you might find.

Carmen: Patient 5624. [Laughs.]

A few weeks ago, you wrote in an Isolation Journals newsletter about how this feels inevitable. And, of course, nothing is inevitable. You know, we make our choices, we come to our crossroads, and we take a path. And it could have been the other path. So it's not an inevitability, but there is a sense of braided… and it's a chosen coming together that this show does in such a beautiful way.

So thank you both. We're going to move on to audience questions now. The first one we have, is for you, Suleika: “As someone who has had a great deal of public success, how do you pull away from the external currents and motion into a quieter, more creative space? As in eddying out, like in a river, accessing the quiet pools. What are your strategies for that?”

Suleika: Yeah. It's something I really struggle with. And as someone who already feels sometimes so frozen by my own expectations, when I imagine anyone outside of me or a body of readers or a public viewing something that I'm working on, it's the fastest way to choking for me. And so I have to trick my brain into feeling like I'm entirely alone when I'm creating. Often when I'm writing, I write longhand on, in journals or on legal pads, because I find that when I'm working out of a word document on my computer,  where all of the other things are happening, social media, emails, I'm too attuned to the outside world and to the tyranny of the backspace bar and the desire to edit before I've even figured out what I'm trying to say.

So it's a very inefficient process to write longhand first. But it makes me feel like I'm journaling and that I have the privacy to explore. And, you know, with my paintings, they really felt so sacred to me. And they were paintings I was making without any expectation of doing anything with them. It might sound melodramatic, but it feels true—Iit felt like I was making them to save my own life. They were my anchor points, at a time where I really felt like I was drowning in this ocean of uncertainty. And so when it came to sharing them here at ArtYard, I had to forget that I was sharing them here at ArtYard.

I had to enter into my own world, which meant being away from my friends, from my husband for many, many weeks at a time. Sometimes it means putting noise canceling headphones on as I work, so I can feel lost and in the privacy of my mind. But I think it's really hard. And I think, it doesn't matter whether you're published or not, or if your creative work is your profession or if it's more of a private practice. We live in this age, of comparison, and of our kind of digital alter egos floating around out there. And it's really hard to preserve the sanctity and the privacy of a space in which you get to make things first and foremost for yourself before you imagine them existing anywhere in the outside world. And I'll just add one last little anecdote and wrap this up.

I have terrible self-control when it comes to the phone. So my new little thing that I've been doing over the last couple of years is when I leave in the morning to walk my dog, I will put my phone in the mailbox, and then I go to work, and I don't go back to the mailbox until I have to walk the dogs again. But I have to physically put the objects that make me feel that impulse to perform, to be someone other than who I am, to somehow possess a skill set that I don't currently have—I have to figure out how to clear all of that away. And that's an ever evolving, struggle and practice.

Carmen: It's like the world is designed for the opposite.

You both answer this one. Can you speak to the power of your fear in propelling you forward in your art? How did you harness it? Has it enlarged your relationship to scary emotions?

Anne: She called me with a nickname, that I will not share. Made me laugh. So, fear.

Maybe it goes with what I was saying, that when you have a problem in your in expressive medium—in what you want to write or paint—this is going to become the core. And maybe fear is the same thing. There's no way around it, because if you avoid fear, and if you try to do something else, it becomes very superficial. You're not saying anything. To me, when I started Suleika’s Shield—her first shield, more then ten years ago—it came out of fear in a way, a fear of words. I could not even write about what was happening. I have a daily journal. I could not write because the words were too—what would I describe? I did not want to see these words. I did not want to hear my fears. I never even discussed them with my husband. It was not what we were about. You were just about being here for Suleika, but in art and in my making each day a little piece of it, just expressing in a very abstract way what was happening on that day. Sometimes they are words, sometimes they are just pictures or sometimes just colors. I was able to, to talk about what was happening in that sense. So I don't know if it answers a question about how to deal with it, but then also not even knowing what I was going to make with these little pieces that were expressing basically a period of time, just acknowledging that we were going through incredible ups and downs and at moments of total despair and loss of hope and others where feel things looked a little better.

And, so I think just letting it be without necessarily having to say it or name that fear, but just finding a way around it. And then eventually I came about the idea of creating it in that shield form that alludes to a kimono shape. But that was nothing was thought about in advance.

It just happened. And then maybe fear is the one that gave me the answer. What we do, with these, with these emotions. And how do we gather them? And how do we tell a story without telling a story? So that’s to me how, specifically around Suleika’s illness, I first work with it in my artistic expression.

Carmen: Yeah. It's obliquely. You don't have to meet it head on or even untangle it or push it away, but just sit with it in that that dispels some of its power, but also brings you somewhere else.

Anne: And often you don't know it's fear. That's the other thing. You don't know what it is. It's something, and you don't even have a name. It would be easier if you if you could say, “Oh, this is fear. Okay, come and sit on my nerves.” But you don't know. It is very uneasy and it just has to develop.

Carmen: And has that grown as a practice over the last ten years, with Suleika? That your art became something different in that time with that first 100 day project, right? That that was a way of coping in crisis—but maybe that had been your practice before. I don't know, I guess I'm assuming. Did your practice around engaging with scary emotions intensify with both of these bouts of illness, or did it feel like a natural thing you were already doing?

Anne: No, I think it intensified the sense of recognizing it and knowing it's okay to deal with it.

So that I had all kind of ways. You remember, you were here when I was writing postcards to myself” I was painting a postcard every day when I was in the hospital and writing it to myself because we stayed at many places during that time to be near Suleika, at artist places, etc., and there I was writing about what was happening a little bit, but then I was afraid of something. I was afraid of a mailman or mailwoman who would read them. So it's not it's not that easy. So I was never that upfront with the words because I say, “What are they going to think if they read this?” So I was still hiding behind the picture.

Carmen: But it's a great, I don't know, take away that you don't have to necessarily charge at it, and wrangle it, that you can do something gentler and more oblique or allusive with those scary emotions.

Suleika, I have one for you. Which way does the inspiration flow most often? Is it from writing to visual art or from painting to writing? Soes it go from source, one to the other?

Suleika: So I have a book due somewhat terrifyingly soon, and I was wondering how having these two looming twin deadlines would be, and my assumption was that I was going to be exhausted from painting, or too exhausted from writing to return to painting.

And it's been the very opposite. As I'm painting, I have so many ideas. I think it's similar to taking a shower or something, and all the best ideas arrive when you're in this kind of in-between suspended state, and same with writing. So it's all very new for me. But I'm enjoying being surprised by the movement between these mediums that are quite different and in application and yet share a through line. And there's really a kind of reverberation that happens from one to the other.

Carmen: Anne, you also do a lot of hybrid stuff, in your journals, especially words and images. Do you find those different sources of inspiration, move you differently in your work?

Anne: Oh, absolutely. Like both expressions are important and kind of like Suleika—but she eventually made something out of paintings—I had the freedom of writing for myself, where I don't have to worry about the results and readership and all of this. So it has become really an essential part of my days. And also in my studio, when I work, somehow it unlocks a certain way of thinking, and I see myself going back and forth.

I paint, and then I'm thinking a thought and I run to my diary, and I write it. And I have a studio diary specifically for that. And it just evolves and everything kind of grows together as I'm getting deep into the stuff of art and the medium, then the stuff of thinking about it gets also deeper and freer and it's something that's unexpected and that I think you have described in the same fashion. But yeah, we wait around for you to go from writing to painting.

Carmen: I think we have time for one final question that both of you can answer. How did you find the strength to share about the darkness? Wasn't it too painful?

Anne: The strength to share about the darkness comes from Suleika, frankly. She is the one who studied the incredible gift to others and to us, her family and to herself, most likely of sharing and naming the vulnerability. And I still remember when you were first hospitalized and your college friends came to your room and you had lost all your hair, you looked very sick and they didn't know what to say sitting on the bed next to you. And Suleika said, “Can you believe I lost all my hair?” And she put everybody immediately at ease because they didn't know what to say.

They were looking at her and she was seeing them looking at you and you just named it. You named for them what it was. And you have done that naming, and in a way, helping others, other people help you and be around you. I'm much more private and I don't share my emotions the same way, but I have learned through Suleika to learn how to name things and to discuss it together. So I think this gift came from from you. And possibly when someone is sick, it's comes from them. They are the ones who set the tone. “I want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about this.”

And, there were points where Suleika wanted to talk about—I still remember, that has nothing to do with art, but she said, “Mom, you know that I could not make it right.” When we first entered the first bone marrow transplant, and I was totally unable to discuss that with me, and it stayed as something I was very sad about, that I just could not talk about the fear of death with my daughter. I left her alone with it, and it's something that stayed with me all these years, and I have reflected on—the importance of if someone opens the door, how do you accept to enter there? How do you not shut it by saying, “Oh, you’re all right.”  

I didn't say that. I just could not could not discuss it with you. And I think that's something that one learns. It's not innate. With circumstances and experiences, little by little each time you learn a little better, maybe how to deal with that.

Suleika: One of the paintings that I made for this show has this large, looming elephant. And I think pretty immediately when I got sick, but certainly when the side effects made it such that my illness announced itself before I could speak for myself, I was keenly aware of other people's discomfort with my appearance, with my illness. And it was deeply isolating. And as unfair maybe as it seems, the onus really is on you when you're the sick person to address the elephant in the room, to wrangle it, to set the tone for how those conversations are going to go.

I hated that the looks of pity that I would attract, because I still felt like myself. I didn't feel like some pitiful sick person. And I really struggled with the kind of platitudes that we reach for when we are uncomfortable and we don't know what to say. And I knew they were coming from a good place, but it was like a constant chorus of “everything's going to be okay,” or “you have to stay positive” or “don't let the negativity in, it'll make the illness worse,” or “God doesn't give you more than you can handle—which is particularly enraging when it does feel like you've been given more than you can handle.” And I realized that, not only did I have to address the elephant in the room, but that I had to model the kind of conversations that I wanted to be having, which is to say, conversations that were grounded in what was happening and that required vulnerability.

And that's not to say I wanted to have sad, scary conversations about death all the time. I wanted to be able to laugh about all kinds of things. But I wasn't—I still am a very private person, but I wasn't comfortable sharing vulnerably, and I began to do so as an antidote to that deep sense of isolation and loneliness that I felt in that experience, despite being surrounded by so many loved ones.

When it comes to sharing beyond your inner circle of beloveds, I think often of Toni Morrison, who said, “If there's a book you want to read and it doesn't exist yet, then you must write it.” And so for me, when I cull from my own life, it's almost the last resort source material. It's when there's something I feel I've lived that I want to make into something. Because it's not just my life on the page. There's like—you know what I'm thinking of.

Carmen: Lucy Grealy.

Suleika: No, try again. Eudora.

Carmen: Eudora Welty. To confront an experience and to resolve it as art.

Suleika: We've spent way too much time together. Yeah. To confront an experience and to resolve it as art. And so I think for me, that's what my writing has been when I've written from my personal life. And that's what these paintings have been.

Carmen: I want to thank you both for taking the time to share this with us. I think a conversation like this will only enrich our experience of the works that you have so beautifully put together. And, thank you to ArtYard for providing the space to show the paintings and for us to talk about them. And, it's just been an honor to be here today.

Suleika: Thank you, Carmen. Thank you, everyone. Merci, maman.

Anne: Thank you, Carmen. Thank you, ArtYard.

Suleika: And thank you, Lentil.