Art on Fire (41 page)

Hours later, Francesca left the house next door and stepped into the garage, desperate to paint though it was freezing outside. The power in the garage was out and had been for weeks, so Francesca plugged an electric heater into a thick, yellow utility cord she ran through the backdoor and into the living room. She wore gloves with no fingertips and wrapped her face many times in a bright red scarf the neighbor had given her.

When she became too tired to continue working—it had been a long two days!—she entered the kitchen. Immediately, she was soothed by the smell of chocolate chip cookies. She read her mother's note several times and took it, along with several cookies, downstairs. There, she sprawled out on the daybed and smoked a final cigarette, exhausted from death and sex and art. The furnace made a new grinding sound that drowned out any others. It concerned her, but she was so tired. She smelled something burning while she dreamt of Lisa's sleeping face, but it mixed with other odors: LeeAnn and cigarettes
and the rough, clinging musk of paint and turpentine. Her brain was littered with thoughts that hadn't existed yesterday. She was happy about LeeAnn. Sad about Lisa. Happy her parents were still together. Sad her grandmother was dead. Happy her sister was still alive; sad they would never be friends. Happy she had a life to return to. And sad.

1
. Because of the odd coincidence that the numbers 3 and 12 were so disproportionately represented in the particulars of the fire, police suspected arson. An investigation ensued. No cause or culprit was determined.

2
. deSilva claimed aesthetic preference and a quest for autonomy led her to spell her surname with the lower case “d,” thus distinguishing herself from her family of origin.

3
. George, Jean.
My Side of the Mountain
. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1959. A child's book that tells the story of Sam Gribley, a discontented boy who runs away from his Manhattan home to live in the wilderness. (It is actually wooded property in the Catskills, owned by his well-off family; this is the detail that escapes children who, striving to emulate the protagonist, set out for the nearest unmarked woods with a Swiss army knife and a worn copy of the novel). deSilva's earmarked copy of the book was found after the lethal fire, wrapped in a Grand Union bag and tucked high on a shelf in the family garage.

4
. Michaels went on to write
The Final Diet
in 1981, a weight-loss plan based on a distortion of Buddhist practices. One could eat as desired, mixing balls of “special cotton” in with each meal. Once in the stomach, the cotton allegedly expanded, thus suppressing the appetite. Many dieters wound up in the emergency room, constipated to the point of obstruction, and Michaels was left penniless following a 1983 class action suit.

5
. DeVaine, Paul. “QuikPiks.”
New York Nights
, April 1989. Esteemed critic Paul DeVaine urged readers to attend deSilva's groundbreaking show at Gallery 19, Soho, calling her use of light “. . . revelatory, transcendent. Through the intrusion of light, she creates a world outside the world she is painting, one that taps at the borders of the painting, begging entry like an animal or a small child. This world is as interesting as the subjects themselves. It is as though the subjects were simply the jumping-off point, an excuse to paint the artist's true concerns.”

6
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 149.

7
. Ibid.

8
. Actually, Mrs. Sinsong jumped from her apartment window while Lisa was at school. The apartment, a one-room, bathroom-in-the-hall situation that straddled Little Italy and Chinatown, sat above a thriving new Chinese restaurant called Buddha's Belly. The restaurant closed soon after the tragedy, and the two remaining Sinsongs migrated to New Haven, where Mr. Sinsong obtained a job in a candle factory.

9
. Sventhrup, Brad.
Mommy, Daddy, Can I Have a Sliderule for Christmas
? Chicago: Random House, 1972. Considered the definitive text on the subject. Sventhrup, renowned for his 1984
Avocado Diet
, a textbook/workbook designed to increase mental aptitude through strict dietary regimen, devoted his scientific career to the study of genius—its causes, and characteristics.

10
. Paul DeVaine points out that, as with so many of deSilva's works,
Rake
presents a secondary subject within the painting, one that takes the viewer inside the work, forcing us to participate in the events that are about to occur or are already in process.
Metaphor and Madness
. Chicago: ARTBooks, 1994, page 115.

11
. Dialo, Lucinda. “Counterstrokes of Violence: How Society Informs Women's Art.”
Caleidoscope, A Journal of Feminist Art
, Winter, 1994.

12
. Hamil, Phillip. “Men Think She's Hot; Women Thinks She's, Well, Hot.”
Illustrated Gent
, April 1994. Photographs by Frannie Lieber. The column was to run as part of the “Women We Love” feature, but editors felt deSilva's sudden death made its inclusion inappropriate. Instead, Hamil turned the article into a post-mortem tribute.

Author's Note
: Hamil, who claims to be the only man deSilva ever dated, proposed marriage to her repeatedly. Though deSilva repeatedly refused, the two maintained a
friendship, the intensity of which varies according to the source. Many have dismissed Hamil's prolific writings on deSilva as obsequious and fawning.

13
. Ibid.

14
. Bell, Cynthia.
Lesbians in Oil
. Atlanta: Amazon Press, 1991, page 69.

Author's note
: There is nothing in the painting to support any connection between Lisa Sinsong and the babysitter. Though the babysitter has black hair, we cannot discern her features or determine her race. She could be Chinese in as much as she could be Inuit. It could as easily and with as much credence be claimed that the rake represented the insane Mr. Sinsong or Isabella, who later in life took to roaming the neighborhood in the dark, frightening children and setting dogs howling for hours.

15
. Wright, Michael.
Art That Heals
. Minneapolis: night-night press, 1992, page 112.

Author's note
: Wright bolsters his argument by pointing out the encore appearance of the rake in
Wash-O-Mat
. In
Wash-O-Mat
, which Wright describes as “Hopperesque in its spartan and somber silence,” the gardening tool is propped against the back wall of a late night laundromat, beside an old woman drinking coffee. A young girl, thin and tall, is seated at the front of the dusty gray room, wearing a sweatshirt, muddy sneakers and jeans, and fervently biting her thumbnail. Wright insists that here again, the rake represents the stalking father figure, and the young girl is, who else?, the artist.
Wash-O-Mat
perished in the 1989 fire.

16
.
The New York Times Book Review
, August 18, 1976.

17
.
New England Poetry
, August 21, 1976.

18
. Gensler, Allen. “An American in Deutschland.”
Village Beat
, September 1976.

Author's Note: A Cry from the Attic
became a major text in junior high schools, was translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and, after some consternation, German, and brought unexpected chaos to the DeSilva home.

19
. Richardson, Warren. “Who's Hot (and Who's Not) on the Soho Scene.”
ArtSpeak: A Monthly Guide
. New York City: Pier Publications, 1987.

20
. This show represented a wide cross-section of female artists: Diane Podolske, a Polish-American who painted portraits of her eastern European ancestors; Jacqui Cane, an African-American who combined oils and collage in her depictions of inner city families; Lili Cooke, the Oscar-winning movie actress/painter; Nina Maria Pinto, a half-Indian, half-European American, whose live installment parodied the “men's movement” so popular in the late ‘80s and early '90s, in which men on vision quests banged drums and mimicked Native American rituals; and Francesca deSilva (half-Jew, lesbian).

21
. The parallels between the mop and pail in
Emergency Room
and the erect tool in
Rake
have not gone unexplored, especially since deSilva, who often worked on two pieces at a time, created these simultaneously. See
Metaphor and Madness
(DeVaine) and
Art That Heals
(Wright) for examinations of the symmetry in the two works.

Author's note
: It is perhaps no surprise that the use of phallic imagery in deSilva's work—specifically in these two paintings—is discussed at length by both writers.

22
. deSilva was a tremendous Lennon fan. She contacted Yoko Ono for permission to use Lennon's lyrics in the piece. Ono, it turned out, was an admirer of deSilva's work and the two women became fast friends. In the two years before deSilva's death, they were several times spotted together strolling through Central Park. Ono later purchased
Virgin
.

23
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 169.

24
. Anna Leighton, “Pseudo-Realism and Lesbianism in the Work of Francesca deSilva,” 1995. Paper on file in Marlboro College Library.

25
. Wright, Michael.
Telling My Truth
. Minneapolis: night-night press, 1995, Introduction.

26
. Dialo, Lucinda. “Counterstrokes of Violence: How Society Informs Women's Art.”
Caleidoscope, A Journal of Feminist Art
, 1994.

27
. Francesca persisted in this medium until the second semester of her senior year, when she discovered oil painting. Her finger paintings were strikingly complicated, often relying upon a thick application of the shiny paint, applied by the entire, flattened hand in a “sweeping stroke, almost a swash,” recalls her art teacher, Molly Blume. Blume remembers that others of deSilva's paintings stood out because they “captured vital moments in nature—an ant carrying the corpse of a queen on its back, a mouse trembling in a bush, small things which, through Francesca's gaze, seemed to tell of some larger, almost epic, struggle.”

28
. Mervins, Earl.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: 12 Cases of Passive Suicide
. New York: New Books, 1982, page 31.

29
. Ibid., page 45. “Allergy to Life” was Mervins' terminology for his patients' affliction. He proposed treating the chronic condition the way we would any other allergy, through managed care.

30
. Ibid., page 32.

31
.
Author's note
: Paul DeVaine coined the term “pseudo-realism,” defining it as a melange of reality, hyperreality, and meta-reality. See DeVaine's
Metaphor and Madness
(Chicago, ARTBooks, 1994), pp. 60–79 and
Counter Reality: the Collapse of Contemporary Sentimentalism
, in MASSART, Jan. 1995. deSilva is considered the foremother of the pseudo-realist movement. Though elements of this style predated her (Francis Bacon is said to have been an influence), Lucinda Dialo, in
Women Paint
!, claims “deSilva was the first to merge subtext, sarcasm, and reality, achieving an unprecedentedly literate product.”
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, pages 97–113.

32
. deVaine, Paul.
Metaphor and Madness
. Chicago: ARTBooks, 1994, page 399.

33
.
Village Voice
, “Big Dyke on Campus—the Whitewashing of Francesca deSilva,” Michael Reilly, 1989.

34
. Cynthia Bell,
Lesbians in Oil
(Atlanta: Amazon Press, 1991), 69.

35
.
New York Daily News
, “Free Places
Not
to Take the Kids,” Larry Barnes. Feb. 13, 1993. 46.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Ibid.
Author's note
: deSilva's retrospective was one of the most well attended in MOMA's history. The show was mounted smack in the middle of the controversy surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts. In spite of what is widely considered to be a pervasive, deviant sexuality in deSilva's work, Jesse Helms, the father of the movement to stop funding the arts, was conspicuously uninterested. Some attributed this to deSilva's fondness for cigarettes (several of her paintings incorporate cigarettes) and Helms' ties to the tobacco industry.

38
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 375.

39
. Van, Vince.
Born to Die
, “Tiny Technicalities that Can Sabotage Your Suicide.” March 1981. The author, not surprisingly, committed suicide shortly after this writing. What was surprising was his method: ingesting huge amounts of salt, inducing a sudden, violent heart attack.

40
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Messenger of Conflict: Homophobia and the Lesbian Artist
. Manly Beach, Australia: Art Down Under, 1994, pages 96–102. Dialo received the Australian Out-Rage award for this book, given annually to “A woman who introduces an important, controversial female figure to the Australian reader.”

41
. “Toward a Female Erotic,” Lucinda Dialo, Yale University, May 1983.

42
. This letter, along with missives from Yoko Ono, Phillip Hamil, Elton John, and an endless roster of admirers and colleagues, is part of a forthcoming, as-yet untitled collection
of deSilva's correspondence. The volume contains letters written between 1984 and 1989.