The plan is to wake up early and finish writing about the unexpected pleasures of grandmothering delightful Penelope. Penelope is almost a year old. I set the alarm for six a.m, but my phone pings at five with a wonderful photograph of Lucky. Lucky is just hours old. There is also a photo of his beautiful, exhausted mother. I am now a grandmother of two.
I am new to this. Having a gynaecologist and obstetrician father who often warned against being ‘an elderly primagravida’ meant I wasn’t one. I had two sons, Charlie and Will, in my twenties and a daughter, Harriet, at thirty-four. But, unlike me, my sons have waited until their forties to reproduce, and Harriet is currently an observant and doting aunt.
But there’s the geographical interference. Penelope in Geelong, Lucky in Ibiza, Spain, me in Thornbury, Melbourne. My grandchildren are semi-virtual. But the themness of these two overrides that. And the iPhone has new significance. All our lives have been changed forever by the new technology, but never in my imaginings and planning for becoming a grandmother did I predict the importance of my phone. I am able to see and hear them in a daily way that would once only have been possible had we all lived in a country town or local suburb, across the road rather than across the world. Where would I be without these photographs, videos and FaceTimes? They deal with the geography and I watch and re-watch the videos.
Yes, my eye is my first sensor, but then there are those sounds. Lucky coos, struggling intensely to mimic his parents, and now, at three months, with enormous cheeks and sparkling eyes, he almost talks. This is what the short, intimate videos from the other side of the world tell me. And I can hear Penelope discussing with herself where to drag the adult-sized watering can as, with determination, she follows her father about his Sunday gardening in the sun. But the phone does not give me touch—the softness of her skin is not translated through to my fingers or lips. And when they look at the phone, they do not see me. The all-important eye contact is absent. I am the watcher. The grandmother watching them change.
Occasionally I have, misguidedly, thrust my phone at someone who turns out to be oblivious to the pleasure and importance of that smile or those first steps, and I am embarrassed to admit I’m known to have forwarded photographs of my grandchildren as if they were ‘Madonna and Child’ paintings by Raphael. Of my siblings, I’m the first to have grandchildren and they appreciate and are indulgent with my infatuation. I was slightly taken aback, though, when I remarked to one of my sisters how beautiful a newborn grandchild was and she replied, matter-of-factly: ‘All babies are.’ I suppose they are. I look at all babies differently now.
In contrast, the other grandmother, mother of the beautiful, exhausted mother, understands my adoration exactly. She was there in Ibiza when Lucky was born and could fill in details of the birth and agree with me about this boy’s extraordinary beauty.
Being a grandmother is a new stage of life for me. I see it is a version of being a parent—an upgraded version, perhaps? I know things now I didn’t know, could not have known at twenty-four, when my first son was born.
Instantaneous birth photographs that ping on my phone in the dawn—what a contrast to the way I did it. A hospital photographer brought me a sheet of images of my baby, who was in an institutional cot in the nursery down the corridor. I chose which photographs to buy, and how many of each. Once home from hospital, I mailed the prints to family and friends. It was a slow process, but it did have the advantage of enabling privacy for the new family.
I have always had a strong sense of responsibility and have always fitted my work as an artist around my children. I was a teacher, I cared for my parents, and recently I cared for my husband Jim, who died three weeks before Penelope was born. (Death and birth often happen coincidently like that.) And so, muddled in with the grief, after a happy forty-year marriage, was the inkling that I could now put my work first. Did I feel guilty, thinking like this? Strangely, realistically, I didn’t. Freud said you need two things to make happiness happen: work and love. Work was an important shared part of our life together and it was what remained.
So, when anticipating Penelope’s birth, I found myself worrying that I would have to be involved, that the new parents would need my help. I didn’t quite want to examine how helping them would fit in with my work. Then I saw Penelope, and held her, and my anxiety evaporated in an instant.
Penelope’s father, Charlie, suggested I might come and stay one night a week. What a change that was from when, some years before her birth, I had said to him, ‘I’d like to speak to you once a week,’ and he had replied, shocked, ‘Oh no, that’s way too often.’
I was better prepared with the as yet un-held Lucky. By then I had over a year of practice at being a grandmother. And I knew that a new young person in the family would change everything for the better. As Charlie said: ‘It’s a shared positive.’
Since becoming a grandmother, I have looked back at myself, not just as a mother but as a child. It is a pathway to the past that is mainly visual, because, like most families, we have photographs. There we are on tricycles, in the paddling pool, at the beach. I am the oldest of four, three girls each fifteen months apart, a seven-year gap and then a boy.
When brother John, the baby, arrived, my father bought a movie camera, but I can only recall one film. It was of baby John waking up. Because the print of the film has been lost, it is only running in my memory, unlike the paintings of us by my father, and the photographs of the three girls by fashion photographer Helmut Newton. My mother, unusually for those days, worked full-time, as the advertising manager at the high-end, fashionable Melbourne department store, Georges. She worked with Newton, so he photographed us, naked in the garden amid daisies (that photographer with the three little girls might be seen differently now). When the middle sister asked our mother where we were living when the next sister was born, our mother replied, ‘I have no idea.’ It says a lot about her state of mind and her life at the time with a full-time job and three children under four.
Significant as the photographs are, my sister’s primary-school diary is a key piece of non-visual evidence about my unusual and early duties of care. One entry explains something to me. When our mother asks my sister to give John a bottle, she replies: ‘Can’t Katherine do it?’ ‘No,’ says Mum, ‘Katherine has already given us tea and toast in bed.’ The oldest child is marked in a different way from the others. I was nine and already taking on responsibilities.
Work, love and responsibility have jostled for my time since I was very young, and the urgency of my work, something I always felt, has persisted into grandmotherhood. Art, creative work, is reparative, but it demands selfish time, and getting time for myself, time for my work, has been a battle from the beginning.
Wanting to have it all has meant that I have sometimes come unstuck. In 1978, I gave birth to my second child and six months later held my first solo exhibition at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries at Melbourne University. My then husband and I drove to Melbourne from the country and left the children with their grandparents, before heading to the opening. As there were no mobile phones, I had no idea that baby Will screamed in agony until his eardrum burst.
Family and work have always been in competition for me. There is urgency and pleasure in both, but not at the same time. Perhaps grandmothering will mend this division within me? Grandmothering is simpler and takes me backwards and forwards in time in a lovely way. Age has given me perspective, which means I am puzzled at some of the things my younger self did in terms of my divided loyalties.
Now I am involved and able to help in practical ways. It is all familiar and all new. I needed to be reminded how to change nappies and how to make up a bottle. I had to learn how to stuff Penelope into onesies and her sleeping bag, because neither item was around when I had my children. Something about Penelope’s routine, established early by Bella, her mother, focuses and slows me down. It also reminds me of being a young mother with energy. And ignorance.
Penelope is an easy baby who likes her sleep. But I’m constantly impressed how, once in her sleeping bag, thumb in her mouth, bundled up with a soft toy, she is off to sleep without a squawk. When I stay the night, I can pick her up if she wakes and snuggle into her warm smell. When she’s awake, she can now look me straight in the eye, look at me and then look away, taking everything in. To my daughter Harriet, I remark how self-absorbed Penelope is. She disagrees: ‘Look at her looking at everything.’ Penelope is both self-absorbed and extroverted. She is already a person, already complex.
I laugh every time I watch the video of Penelope tasting a lemon and gagging, just like an adult. In a painterly photograph of Penelope at daycare, she has crawled into a basket and fallen asleep, the sun on her cheek, her thumb in her mouth, surrounded by a soft toy, an open book, green grass and a red truck. When she began crawling, she would take off, head down. Months later, I witnessed her evident pleasure in standing upright. Her mother sent me a video of her on a sunny morning in the laundry: Penelope pushes a trolley of blocks into a pile of dirty washing, takes the coloured blocks out one at a time, bangs them together, places the blue ones to left, the yellow ones to the right, then puts them all back in the trolley. Wanting a further adventure, she climbs over the blocks and through the handles of the trolley as if in an obstacle race.
I study a video of Lucky, asleep in Ibiza, dreaming of sucking, an Australian football game on the television in the background. Lucky was born during a hot Spanish summer. Sometimes he wears a nappy, never much else. I watch him lying on a sheepskin, cooing enchantingly; it is a Manet-like scene of sunshine, his mother and Will picnicking with friends by a river. The end of the video is punctuated by Lucky having a poo, no nappy. Not Manet.
I try to remember our family at these young stages. My parents married in England and left for Australia in 1948. My father said to his twenty-four-year-old wife, ‘Take a good look at your parents as you will never see them again.’ And she didn’t. I was born in the Mercy Hospital, Melbourne, with two horns on my head, so I was rushed away into a humidicrib. No one told my mother what was happening. A wreath arrived and she assumed it was for her newborn, two-horned baby. In fact, it was for her mother, who had died the day I was born. Once again, another death, another birth.
I have only hazy memories of my other grandparents. My father’s mother died when I was four. I was told that she doted on me, but I can’t remember her. Perhaps this explains why my pleasure in grandmothering has been such a surprise to me.
My husband’s mother, Dorothy, was eighty-eight when we took Harriet, the last of her twelve grandchildren, to meet her. Between Harriet and Dorothy, the life span stretched back to Dorothy having her tonsils removed without anaesthetic in 1905. What will Penelope and Lucky find amazing about me and my life when they look back like this?
My mother has been the memorable grandparent for my children. Or perhaps I should say, the model for haphazard, if loving, grandparenting? There and not there. Charlie remembers his grandmother collecting him from school, riding the clutch and skidding in the tram tracks. He also remembers her serving crème caramel for dessert. Less rosy is his memory of her when she moved in to mind the three of them while we were away. One night, she woke him when she was having an asthma attack. Terrified, he held her mask to her face so she could breathe, and drove her across a busy main road, back to her house. At sixteen, he knew how to drive, but had no licence. When Harriet was a teenager, she locked herself out of our apartment and had to catch the tram to Grandma’s house. She found her seventy-eight-year-old grandmother standing on the dining-room table, trying to change a light bulb. While loving and wanting to hold onto the baby stages of my grandchildren, I look back on those interactions between my mother and her grandchildren and I envisage different future pleasures for myself as my grandchildren grow up.
Having arrived at this stage in life, I also see the past in a new light. Despite never changing a nappy, my first husband’s mother was a terrific grandmother. She remained an involved and positive force in her grandsons’ lives even after our divorce took them far from the next paddock, where we had lived. Until now, I had no idea how painful that change must have been for her. She visited us, and rang regularly to talk to them, and to me about them.
Thirty-four years ago, when I was pregnant with Harriet, Jim and I made a trip to New York to look at art. I was on the lookout for paintings of babies that had meaning for me, not just ‘Madonna and Child’ paintings, in which most of the babies look like miniature men. Now I have even more reason to be on the lookout for baby paintings. I realise that, all those years ago, I was searching for a tradition to work within. I am still searching, perhaps with more urgency.
While I am interested in women who painted babies and in those who managed to both work and be mothers, one of my favourite paintings of a baby is by Van Gogh. Through the energy and turbulence in his use of paint in Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle, he gives us a real baby, one who engages with the viewer, one we might see on the street, who might make eye contact with us. Yet, despite the ordinary setting, Van Gogh’s mother and baby arrangement is still a variation on the ‘Madonna and Child’ pose, the thick yellow paint behind the baby suggesting an eternal halo. A picture painted by a man who never had a child. Perhaps this explains its power.
The great American portrait artist Alice Neel (1900–1984), whose subjects were her relatives, friends and neighbours, is one of very few artists to paint her grandchildren. Her portrait Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) reads as a contemporary ‘Madonna and Child’, although Nancy and Olivia are not at all generalised figures, but are painted with startling, if disturbing, precision and particularity. There is, as in many of Neel’s portraits, an aura of anxiety about the subjects. In her 1934 nude painting of her six-year-old daughter Isabetta, the girl stands facing the viewer, strong, confronting. Isabetta was raised by her Cuban grandparents. Neel saw her again only twice, and repainted the portrait in 1935. I find myself reacting emotionally to the powerful work and difficult life of Alice Neel, and of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Both were modernist in style, but chose the deeply personal, female subjects of pregnancy, babies and children, subjects that had traditionally been considered insignificant. While Neel led a long and tough life, Modersohn-Becker died at only thirty-two, ten days after giving birth to her only child.
It is not that artists don’t choose to paint babies and children—they do. The paintings, however, rarely feature in catalogues or retrospectives, as, until recently, they have been considered minor works—the central miracle of life relegated to the margins. The issue has been compounded by the historical invisibility of women artists. But things are changing. The writer and art critic Jennifer Higgie has for many years posted a woman artist’s work and biography on Instagram every day. Now we can see, digitally, more paintings by women, and more in which babies, children, grandchildren and mothers are subjects. How exhilarating it is that these subjects are emerging from the shadows of the ‘domestic’ and ‘minor’.
I look forward to my grandchildren drawing and painting with me. Will I paint my grandchildren? It’s early days, but so far I choose to use my iPhone to document them. Drawing and painting them would involve my interpretation and that’s not what I’m after at the moment. But virtual or painted records are nothing compared to holding a baby in your arms, laughing with them—and being the subject of that all-powerful gaze.