I’ve been thinking about my mother since her 90th birthday a week ago. I traveled back east to see her and many family members that I had not seen in many years. Everyone enjoyed the time together. Mom had a bad night my last night there. She didn’t seem well in the morning and and we called the nurse to take a look at her. I found out that she was admitted to the hospital just as the airplane was leaving the gate and I had to turn off my phone take off.

Those of you who have been following my posts of the last few day’s know all this. Mom is still in the hospital. She is on dialysis and her kidneys don’t seem to be working well at the moment. We hope that this will turn around but we have not had much encouragement.

Compartmentalization:

I have always been rather good at compartmentalizing my feelings. Now, I’m hanging my hat on the idea that Mom will come through. She’s a tough lady. Everyone says so. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

My compartmentalization process extends to my way of expressing myself visually. I had my brush with Death in yesterday’s post, but today I concentrate on what is going on physically with my mother.

Today’s watercolor:

Today, I simply wanted to depict kidneys that were not working. I chose red and blue to represent the oxygenated and oxygen-starved blood. The lungs allow oxygen back into the blood and the kidneys are supposed to remove toxins from the blood in urine.

I represented one of these toxin-removing organs by a kidney-shaped colander, that is supposed act as a filter. This is a sick kidney, since no urine is being made or released into the plumbing below.

Comment:

It was only after I finished this study did I realize a connection with works of art of the past. For instance, the funnel-shaped apparatus at the bottom of the painting resembles Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.“, French for “This is not a pipe.” Magritte’s title acknowledges the fact that his painting was a representation of a pipe, and not an actual pipe.  In my composition, my funneled ‘pipe’ is not even a representation of a pipe, but rather is a ‘stand-in’ for the tubes composed of biological matter whose function is to conduct urine away from the urine producing organ (the sieve, above).

The other work of art inadvertently referred to in my study is The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp submitted a factory-made urinal as an entry for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. One defense for this non-artist-made object qualifying as art was the very fact that an artist chose it. “He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.” (from The Blind Man, Vol. 2, 1917, p. 5.)

My representation of the kidney is a kidney-shaped spaghetti strainer… certainly a new thought for that object.

It seems my compartmentalization process reveals the presence of even more compartments within. I dread the day when this technique doesn’t work.