Maureen Connor

So, Gainsborough took me by surprise. All the more so because I felt there was some relation between the equivalence he established between his muslin trees and mossy gowns and what I hoped to evoke with fabric as a medium in my own work.

But what was most extraordinary of all was that my father saw it too. He turned to me after looking at the painting briefly and said, “Is that what you’re getting at, like those trees and gowns?” or something like that. The pieces he had just seen were large white organdy sculptures, folded and starched to provide structure. I too, wanted fabric to imply all sorts of qualities from mist to marble, each association playing off another until the contrasts provided a similarly self-aware escape as I had experienced while looking at St. James’s Park. Some of my intentions had become more conscious. And at the moment this occurred my father told me that I had already been successful.

In what way can escape be made valuable — different from the popular forms such as adventure stories or pornography? How can it be translated into transcendence? How can something otherworldly, something totally unattainable be relevant to contemporary culture? My experience with my father suggests some tentative answers to these questions.

His fantasies and expectations have been manipulated by the media as well as resulting from his own naïveté. It is difficult to avoid the escapism valued by contemporary culture that seems determined to desperately deny the ultimate inescapability of certain aspects of life. It is, of course very painful to admit that there are some losses or disappointments for which one can never be fully compensated. Yet, for my father and me, art that authentically addressed the unattainable paradoxically helped us both reconcile irreplaceable loss.
As we stood there looking at the Gainsborough I knew for certain that my father had a much deeper awareness of the nature of art and placed a higher value on it, than I had imagined. Although he couldn’t fully articulate the feeling (neither could I at that moment) he seemed to express an understanding that painting and sculpture were endeavors which sought to capture more than a likeness of a well-chosen subject. His recognition of art as more than just a skill or craft meant that he sensed my own higher ambitions and that, in spite of the many disappointments I may have caused him, I was now somewhat vindicated. My divorce, my lack of offspring, my lack of financial success, my seemingly alien values and goals all became instantly perceptible through his newly acquired understanding because my work seemed to fulfill at least some, if not all, of the qualities he deemed necessary to art.
I was given the opportunity to design an outdoor piece in a park in Houston, Texas about six months after he died. It didn’t take long for me to think of the Gainsborough and to plan the installation as a memorial to my father based on the painting. The Buffalo Bayou, as the park is called, is a long green stripe near the center of Houston. It has great variety in its landscape including flat open fields, carefully kept gardens with fountains, and a swamp with very tall, mostly dead trees. It was this last that provided the background and structure for the piece. Draped in vines and Spanish moss, the trees formed a perfect proscenium, as if Gainsborough had conjured them up. The installation was meant to evoke some of the qualities I had responded to in the painting, not to be a replica or even an hommage but an ephemeral monument signifying both the difficulty and the acceptance of loss.