Art on Fire (42 page)

43
. Wright, Michael.
Art That Heals
. Minneapolis: night-night press, 1991, page 112.

44
. Barnes, Larry. “Free Places
Not
to take the Kids,”
New York Daily News
, February 13, 1993.

45
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 149.

46
. Bell, Cynthia.
Lesbians in Oil
. Atlanta: Amazon Press, 1995, pages 229–230.

47
. Leighton, Anna. “Lala: Pseudo-Realism and Homosexual Symbolism in the Work of Francesca deSilva,” 1996. Paper on file in Marlboro College Library.

48
. Hamil, Phillip. “Live Fast, Die Young, Watch the Vultures Feed.”
Vanity Fair
, April 1993, page 112.

49
. Feinstein, Clara. “Much Ado About Mediocrity—the Whitney's Retrospective of Francesca deSilva.”
The New Yorker
. Feinstein, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and briefly pursued a career as a collage artist, frequently bemoans the plethora of unrecognized female artists. What is interesting is that deSilva, whose rags to riches story contained all the elements Feinstein relished, irritated her so. Even more puzzling is that after deSilva's death in 1989, Feinstein warmed toward the artist. In a 1993 New Yorker article, she wrote, “deSilva brought art to the proletariat because she was one of the people and, like most of the people, was concerned only with herself. The popularity of her small-town vision, combined with the public's prurient curiosity about the colorful antics of her personal life, fueled an anomalous success. deSilva demonstrates self-involvement serving community. Her own myopia penetrated the public's apathy by converting their concerns, i.e., themselves and their social reality, into art.”

Note
: A fable in the lesbian underground tells of a party held to raise funds for a statue of Ana Mendieta to be erected on the block where she “fell” to her death. Feinstein is said to have dogged deSilva all evening, finally making a grand scene when the artist definitively rebuffed her.

50
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 26.

51
. Ibid.

52
. Perhaps the site of the Wellfleet Flea Market, where deSilva worked upon arriving on Cape Cod.

53
. Wright, Michael.
Art That Heals
. Minneapolis: night-night Press, 1991, page 135.

54
. CAWD was actually a satellite of Christian Component, the largest coalition of religio-political lobbyists in the United States. For an in-depth analysis of CAWD's fervent and baffling objections to deSilva's work, see: Tagson, Susan.
Religion As Illness
. New York, Martin Street Press: 1989.

55
. A halo used in ancient religious paintings, usually in connection with saints or the Virgin Mary.

56
. The irony here is that deSilva knew next to nothing about Christianity. Half-Jewish, half-Italian, she had a secular upbringing. She'd been raised without any religious beliefs, had experienced God in only the most superficial manner—e.g., tripping on the sidewalk and being told by her mother that God was punishing her for some childish transgression. There was no basis for the sort of nihilistic rebellion of which she was accused.

57
. Wallace, Charlotte. Editorial.
New York Times
, New York City, 1985.

58
. DeVaine, Paul.
The Accidental Rebel: Controversy in the Work of Francesca deSilva
. New York: Little, Brown, 1996, page 56.

59
. In response to Christian opposition to the painting, demonstrations were held in New York City by an organization called the Pacific Islanders Coalition (PID). The group claimed that CAWD's objections to the painting had less to do with incest than abject
horror at an implied connection between the Virgin Mary and a Chinese-American girl.

60
. Dialo, Lucinda. “Counterstrokes of Violence: How Society Informs Women's Art.”
Caleidoscope, A Journal of Feminist Art
, Winter, 1995.

61
. The sale of this painting to Berman and Patton, well-known New York collectors, disintegrated.
Birds, Everywhere
, never sold, was destroyed in the fire. The spooky work depicted a nuclear family lunching on fried chicken, seated, one beside another, on the sole picnic bench in a serene, manicured suburban park. On all sides are gray water and a heavy pink sky. Perched in the treetops and covering the surface of a large gray rock, unseen by all but one daughter who gazes fearfully at the trees as she bites down on a chicken leg, are throngs of crows. For discussions of this work, consult Paul DeVaine (
Metaphors and Madness
. Chicago: ARTBooks, 1994) or Cynthia Bell (
Lesbians in Oil
(Atlanta: Amazon Press, 1991).

62
. DeVaine, Paul. “Spare, Bold, Defiant—The Gender-Neutral Paintings of Francesca deSilva.”
art
, October, 1987.

63
. Letters to the Editor,
art
, December 1987.

64
. Ibid.

65
. Warhol, it must be remembered, was not a painter.

66
. Grosjean, Jean. “Francesca deSilva: An American Painter in the Dark”. BRUSHSTROKES, Canada, Montreal, 1988.

67
. Reilly, Michael. “Conversation with Francesca deSilva—Painter, Agitator, Reluctant Rebel.”
Village Voice
, 1989.

68
. Village Voice, “Conversation with Francesca deSilva—Painter, Agitator, Reluctant Rebel,” Michael Reilly, 1987.

69
. In 1990, after founding San Francisco's pro-sex publication
LICK
, Wall wrote an article about her summer romp with deSilva called “The Stone Goddess of Truth.” She later self-published a slim account of their affair (à la Peggy Caserta's lewd tell-all volume about Janis Joplin,
Going Down with Janis
) titled
Suburbia Upended
, under her own imprint, boundandgagged books, San Francisco. Here, she asserted that Francesca deSilva used her painting as a means of avoiding intimacy and that the artist was, unadmittedly, a stone butch—i.e., one who provides sexual pleasure but does not want to be touched.

Author's note
: Other evidence controverts this.

70
. Both
Bunyan
and
Reality Has Intruded Here
were created on materials rescued from the excavated property of an elderly woman, Mrs. May, of whom deSilva was very fond. Like Evelyn Horowitz, Mrs. May had a talent for mahjong and cards; but unlike Evelyn, Mrs. May was a lesbian. After the woman's death, her property and the 150-year-old house where she'd lived since childhood, were leveled and developed for condominiums.

71
. Bell, Cynthia.
The Butch Is Back
. Santa Cruz: Labrys Press, 1995.

72
. “Deconstructing deSilva.”
Illustrated Gent
, January 1990, page 52.

73
. deSilva's use of language-as-image was unprecedented in her work and thought to have been a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat. The word BABE here acts as metatext, commenting on the sexist paradigm responsible for creating the legend of Paul Bunyan and embellishing it with all the attributes coveted by the hearty American male, including access to the nubile female, or “babe.” “What is the word babe in modern American culture?,” asks Dialo in
Artful Deviation: An Examination of Gender Treachery in Woolf's Orlando and deSilva's Bunyan
. “An epithet. A term of endearment. A woman's name. A cheap cologne. It is a female-identified word, implies a familiarity, or, conversely, perhaps conjointly, devaluation. deSilva's choice to omit the blue ox as an image, but to instead paint its name, draws our attention away from the friendly figure of the
story, into semantics, and the folktale's more disquieting themes.”

74
. Clara Feinstein. “Much Ado About Mediocrity—The Whitney's Retrospective of Francesca deSilva.”
The New Yorker
.

75
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Artful Deviation: An Examination of Gender Treachery in Woolf's Orlando and deSilva's Bunyan
. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, page 346.

76
. Dorff, R. Randy. “The Queering of Machismo in the Eurocentric Folk Legend.”
A Multi-Cultural Reader
. Harvard University, April 12, 1994. Note: The ox, which popularly conjures a huge creature of boundless strength, actually refers to any of several members of the bull family (e.g., yak, buffalo, bison, gaur) and is most accurately defined as “a castrated, domesticated bull, used as a draft animal.” [Webster's New World Dictionary; Third College Edition.]

77
. Ibid.

78
. Ibid.

79
. Hamil's term has been popularized, its meaning expanded to describe an insatiable appetite for voyeuristic prattle.

80
. Hamil, Phillip. “Live Fast, Die Young, Watch the Vultures Feed.”
Vanity Fair
, April 1993, page 112. Author's note: Some might say that Hamil's prophecy has been realized.

81
. Dialo Lucinda.
Women Paint
! New York: Little, Brown, 1991, page 162.

82
. Jones, May and Particip, Ann.
Creativity in Female Siblings—The Case for Eugenics
. Chicago: Mind and Matter, 1994, page 211.

83
. Dialo, Lucinda. “Counterstrokes of Violence: How Society Informs Women's Art.”
Caleidoscope, A Journal of Feminist Art
, 1994.

84
. Dialo, Lucinda.
Message of Conflict: Homophobia and the Lesbian Artist
. San Francisco: Labrys Press, 1995, pages 72–87.

85
. The authors define this as “a merging of personae unmitigated by physical distance.” Jones, May and Particip, Ann. “The Inexplicable Painting: the Phenomemon of Sororal Symbiosis as the Basis for Stylistic Inconsistencies in the Final Work of Francesca deSilva.”
Genetics: The Journal of Science and Humanity
, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1990.

86
. Bell, Cynthia. “Dyke Envy: The Latest Heterosexual Pasttime.”
Culture Shock
, New York City, 1994.

87
. Dialo, Lucinda. Editorial: “The Psychologization of Art.”
ArtNews
, Summer 1995.

88
. Bell, Cynthia. “Dyke Envy: The Latest Heterosexual Pasttime.”
Culture Shock
, New York City, 1994.

89
.
Village Voice
writer Reilly, raises an outré, tongue-in-cheek, and yet compelling possibility (see “We Like Our Lesbians Angry, Please . . .”
Village Voice
, 1992). Why would deSilva be rushing, he muses, if she did not know the house would be burned down? Isn't it possible that she escaped the charring inferno and is living (à la Jim Morrison and Elvis) in Buenos Aires, painting wall size canvases for cheap hotels?

Author's note
: It is not impossible. While it appears that deSilva's remains were crushed under the weight of the fallen house, and while evidence confirms an extant fourth corpse, it cannot be definitively proven that the corpse was, indeed, Francesca deSilva's.

 

Hilary Sloin
is a novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, and playwright. Her work has been published in many small journals and anthologies including
Parting Gifts, character i, Notes, Phoebe
, and
Lesbian Love Stories I and II. Art On Fire
has been an almost-winner many times: It was a finalist for the Heekin Foundation Award, the Mid-list Press Competition, the Dana Awards, and The Story Oaks Prize. It received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and was mistakenly awarded the non-fiction prize in the Amherst Book and Plow Competition. She has been a resident at the Cottages at Hedgebrook and the Dorset Colony House, and during the '80s and '90s her plays were produced in major cities across the country. She lives in the hills of Western Massachusetts with Pluto, her tiny Jack Russell Terrier, and has a side business acquiring, restoring, and selling antiques.

Art on Fire
, which for years was known by the toothy title
The Unfinished Life of Francesca deSilva
, took a long time to write and an even longer time to find a publishing home. Along the way so many people read and critiqued my various versions of the manuscript, kindly pointing up the places where I had swerved into a cement pole, that I cannot possibly name everyone here—much as I'd like to. I know and remember enough to thank the Cottages at Hedgebrook and the Dorset Colony House for giving me space and time to write and for helping me develop the discipline and work ethic required to complete a long project. The immortal Val Clark was the biggest champion I have ever had. For years, novelist and poet supreme Susan Stinson and Bywater author Sally Bellerose were astute and patient readers, excellent friends and fellow mischief-makers. We worked hard and played hard and this book would not have come to completion without them. Meryl Cohn and Mary Beth Caschetta propped me up when I had pretty much thrown in the towel. My cousin, Harry Gold, a staunch critic who, I am sad to say, is no longer with us on the planet, loved this book and told me he was certain I had “it”—words every writer longs to hear from a discerning source. Meredith Rose provided hours of intelligent and challenging conversation about the writing life and whether it was, in the end, worth the trouble (the jury is still out). Barb Hadden strutted into my world one day and, with her paint-smattered clothes and killer smile, seemed to be the materialization of my adored character. This was scary and fascinating and made me open the
pages once again to see if I could do anything more to help the manuscript see the light of day. Finally, I feel I have been rewarded for something good I did along the way by the arrival of Revan Schendler's friendship. Her brilliance and generosity astonish me and I find she is often all the audience I need.