Tell Me Your Secrets

This piece will take the form of a short series of paintings and poetic texts in response to the relationship of human and animal, me and my dog. My dog serves as muse, counsel, and guide, accompanying me throughout the lands and lifetimes that I customarily traverse in my large oil paintings. This work will use Sullivan’s (2010) framework of visual arts research as a means of focusing primarily on ways that visual arts knowledge can be “framed, encountered, and created” as insights are communicated (p. 100). I will present a recent series of my paintings, “ghosts in the nursery” (Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975; O’Loughlin, 2009), exploring issues of familial trauma bridged by the loving, guarding, compassionate presence of my dog, Auggie. The visuals and text reveal reflective practice that offers possibilities for conceptualizing art practice as research. The Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1956) said: “I know that every human being goes his way alone toward love, alone toward glory and toward death … Let me come with you” (p. 60). As we move together toward love, toward death, Auggie and I traverse a painted universe. This road we walk together—canine and human—is now peopled.

Figure 1.

Augustus Takes a Visit to Skiathos. 2012. 60 × 72 in.

Transparent blue, like the sea, you wash through me.Tell me your secrets. How many times have you spoken to me without sound?Traces of ancestors left me asking “From where do the hauntings come?”There is my uncle, always a phantom, scratching his head;Brow furrowed; walking frenetically in my child’s mind.My Greek Grandmother, bearer of big stuffed dolls and pianos.Whose son breaks upon Mediterranean sands?My ancestors move in spirals, through me, careening forward and back.

Figure 2.

Treasure Tower. 2012. 60 × 72 in.

I am peopled by ghosts. O’Loughlin (2012) writes: “In exploring spectral aspects of experience, uncanny events and silences, and intrusions I am suggesting that we need to take seriously aspects of experience beyond the here and now. … What if time is not linear, and experience is neither sequential nor cumulative? What if there are dimensions beyond time? … Derrida (1994) suggests that we should carefully explore hauntology as a more comprehensive study of being than mere ontology” (p. 234). “Amidst those at the ceremony in the air, the birds, along with humans, always seek flight” (Nichiren Daishonin, 1277/1999, p. 887).

Figure 3.

Treasure Tower. 2012. 60 × 72 in.

On the floor, doggie decides it is his time. He rolls over, with a groan. The frogman position. On his back. Mouth open like a fox, legs sprawled out. “Frogman.” And I start in on my tongues: the language that does not exist except for my dog and me. He looks up: “There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends. In Judith Butler’s terms, there are only ‘contingent foundations,’ bodies that matter are the result. A bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time trump the imaginings of even the most baroque cosmologists. For me, that is what companion species signifies” (Haraway, 2003, p. 6).

Figure 4.

Red Dog by the River. 2012. 60 × 60 in.

The dog walks me back, walks me forward. His white,thick, warm tail coiling in front; zig-zagging behind.He is golden. He has dark brown imploring eyes; his furry coat,the white yellow velvet of a sweet warm night.His fur, soft like a dusty morning; his ears, to touch,like warm soft syrup, his nose pausing for thought as it givesa little shift now and again when the wind comes right andalights upon it and he catches a scent. The true caretaker.He holds the present upon his shoulders. We walk.He gazes up from the heel position, laughing as we catch each other’s eyes.Thank goodness he is in my paintings.The...