No. 40 – Vulnerability is Punk AF

You Think You're Better Than Me

Welcome to the latest issue of Feed the Monster, a monthly art journal for the creative and imperfect. Come as you are.

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Last month I “dropped” my new collage class, and soon started to worry about how it would come across. Was I too awkward? I was definitely somewhat awkward. Did I focus on the right things? Was it funny where it was meant to be, or did I just come across as some weird freak? Truth can hurt.

I was feeling vulnerable.

I requested feedback from everyone I knew who’d bought the class. Renée Layberry was one of those, and when I mentioned my feelings in an email she responded with “vulnerability is punk AF”. She apparently made this phrase up, though I expected her to say it was the battle cry of all self-respecting Brené Brown fans or something. A meme, at least. I liked this new catchphrase so much I immediately wanted it for the title of this month’s Feed the Monster, though I had no idea at the time what I was going to write.

Then I happened to start work on a wall-sized graphic memoir piece (see below) about my relationship with my mother, as part of my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project. You can see how creating this piece could make a person feel vulnerable… gulp. Making available my Collage Class video made me feel no less insecure. You make a thing… maybe a thing that’s new to you. You take a chance. It’s not perfect. You put it out there. You feel a bit wobbly inside. You wait.

Note: As uncomfortable as it is, I never want to stop experiencing this risk-taking. It’s what keeps me, and the artwork, alive.

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I’ve found that the response to Feed the Monster is greatest when I’m frank about my imperfection and vulnerability as a human being. This seems to be the stuff that touches people… that they relate to the most keenly. People clearly need to know they aren’t alone in not always being right, not always being sure, making mistakes, and struggling with certain aspects of their lives. That they trip; that they cry.

It can take practice to speak freely about these things, but I’ve learned that far from being dangerous, allowing and showing vulnerability becomes a superpower that a lot of people are missing out on. People who seem to think that appearing infallible means they’re infallible (or that they’re fooling anybody).

Nope. Pretty much the opposite is true.

As for the giant graphic memoir piece below… well yikes. My Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project has mutated many times since it first germinated about a year and a half ago. Originally it was meant to be a visual memoir both about my mother’s dementia and my difficult relationship with her that informed the caretaking I did. I wanted to show how I went from initial horror at having to deal with my mother and her affairs, to being thankful for having been forced up that mountain.

Life’s Work is still about those things, but (unsurprisingly perhaps) I’ve found it much harder to approach the mother-daughter relationship than the dementia stories. Partway through the piece below I found myself thinking, “so maybe this one piece will suffice in illustrating my relationship with my Mom… no need to go on and on about it!” And maybe that’s true. Or it could be an indication of my discomfort: I fear coming across as feeling sorry for myself, or sensationalist. I keep thinking of the Philip Larkin poem This Be The Verse:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I mean, it’s boring, right? My experience is commonplace. I don’t want to whine about it, or lay blame. It became clear to me at some point that I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t struggled to overcome certain adaptive habits of mind developed in childhood. And that dealing with the ways in which your parents fuck you up can create superpowers, too. I even began to see Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir as a tribute to my mother, though that surprised me and it certainly didn’t start out that way. It was more like: Ugh, I have a shit-ton of material here begging to be mined, and anyway haven’t I been writing about this my whole life?

This wall piece was not pre-conceived. I was given a roll of wide photography back-drop paper by Ted Grant and I decided to put some of it up on the wall in case it gave me some ideas. Et voilà, I got the idea to do a super-sized graphic memoir piece, and so painted a series of rectangles free-hand. But it stayed that way for two or three months with only the word “Presenting!” written in the top left-hand panel. I’d had the idea back in the fall to do a piece about being a “dutiful daughter”, but the bedside scene with my mother was kept safely on the back burner because I wasn’t sure how to approach it.

What ended up emerging has developed organically. I’m using a bamboo brush (the kind used for Chinese calligraphy) because it gives me very little control, so it prevents me from worrying over the execution of the images. In other words, it precludes getting too wound up or precious about the painting aspect. I wanted to work quickly, without over-thinking. That way I was able to get lost in allowing the piece to unfold as it wanted to.

I pulled out all the tropes of “presenting”, “starring”, “once upon a time”, “dutiful daughter” and “wicked mother” to overstate the idea of this being a STORY… though a true story. But just a story—not a unique story—a story that has happened millions of times in millions of ways. This too was not something I thought about… I just did it.

The piece is not going to look like anything I’ve ever done before, and I’m glad (I’ll show you the finished product in next month’s FTM). It definitely looks very unpolished, but I’m okay with that. When I started painting portraits in 2015 with 100 Days of the Artist is Present, I got better and better at it, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that! But it became a formula and started to feel pretty stale. I liked having that skill, but I wanted to go somewhere portraits couldn’t take me. Enter once again… vulnerability. Trying new things affords the possibility of unexpected results that the old tried n’ true usually can’t deliver, and I seem to be developing a taste for that. Huzzah!

💣💣💣💣💣BYE! THANKS FOR READING!💣💣💣💣💣

🔴Buy my Collage Class—$40 CAD for a one-hour prerecorded download

🔴Listen to my interview with Sheryl MacKay on CBC’s NxNW here (starts ten minutes in). It’s all about Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir, an art exhibit about my mother’s Lewy Body dementia and my relationship with her

🔴Visit balampman.com

🔴There's always Instagram