By Lia Smith.
Ciro Guerra’s movie, Embrace of the Serpent, draws on the historical work of a German ethnologist and an American botanist deeply interested in the plants of the Amazon. In the film, Karamakate, the last survivor of the indigenous Cohiuano tribe, after seeing a drawing in the ethnologist’s notebook, demands to know how the German came upon imagery that Karamakate accesses only through plant-induced hallucinogenic dream states. The scientist says he has never been allowed to participate in the Cohiuano’s secret rituals and that the imagery came from the only dream he has ever had. Years later, a botanist following the work of the ethnologist claims to be seeking the plant the Cohiuano use in their sacred rituals as a means to access his dreams. Karamakate finds both men to be only interested in destruction. He tells the men that dreams come to us if we stay connected to ourselves and to nature. He says we must allow our dreams to enter us; by letting our dreams through and listening to them, we will espouse life and not death.
The artist Tina Mion espouses life by accessing her dreams, and though she remarks that the unconscious is at work, she does not chase after it. “Sometimes I paint what I dream,” she says in the casual offhand manner with which others say, ‘Sometimes I stare at the sky.’ Mion, whose painting Stop Action Assassination (Jackie Kennedy) was gifted to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2007, paints mostly in oil. Her work includes conceptual art; in 1994-1996, she pitted her paintings of the then forty-two US presidents against one another and asked gallery viewers to choose a winner (whether they were voting for the accomplishments of a particular president or for the quality of the painting itself was left up to the voters).
I came across Mion’s work in the early aughts in the lobbies of La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona. During the years my mother lived in Winslow, she spent many hours at La Posada, either in its grounds, its gardens, the numerous lobbies—all generously kept open to the public—or its five-star restaurant. My mother’s disapproval and dismissal of Mion’s work caught my attention and wanting to come to my own conclusions, I spent an afternoon looking at Mion’s paintings and found her Ladies First series intriguing and educational. In eighteen paintings done over a five-year period (1997-2002), distinguishing between a First Lady persona and the flesh and blood woman, Mion depicts the wives of United States presidents, associating them with playing cards and, through her imagery, noting certain aspects of their lives: personal tragedy, female assertiveness, the death of children, illness, stateswomanship, madness, self-sacrifice, secrets.
As the years passed, Mion’s Ladies First series stayed with me. When I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, Mion’s work had already primed me for understanding Mary Todd Lincoln, and when filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln came out in 2012, I was able to appreciate the brilliance of Sally Field’s acting in her role as Mary Todd. Instead of presenting an idealized version of Lincoln’s wife, Field reveals a complex individual who, living in the umbra of a man wresting with the power of a nation, finds herself thrust into public life and pushed to the edges of madness.
A twenty-four-minute documentary by David Herzberg, Behind the Studio Door, takes us into Mion’s locked sanctuary. Mion’s studio is neatly laid out, her materials well-organized, offering her an abundance of space to move and work freely. She regularly fills notebooks with sketches and studies and writing. “Lots of writing.” A jumble of found objects covers one table, but Mion’s fingers easily find what she is looking for. She manipulates nails, a button, and an eraser and then uses a desk lamp to explore the shadows she wants to capture. She moves quickly, without ceremony, following her instincts, and when she lifts the eraser she has used as a placeholder and begins to draw, her skills are undeniable. In Mion’s studio, nothing is precious, not even her childhood drawings that her grandmother saved. She handles everything with creative energy, like someone reaching for handfuls of clay as they sculpt. Without hesitation, she draws and paints tiny, delicate images, reminding me of the way children create drawings before they learn to analyze or censor, before they are trained to consider the value or cost of the art materials.
In the documentary, Mion says, “It’s not that I don’t have ideas, I have too many… so I have to figure out which ones are just screaming to come out.” Describing what drives her, Mion candidly admits, “Neuroses, too much energy,” and explains that painting is an escape for her to a place where she has a sense of control. She goes on to say that making art is a release valve, that when she finishes and puts down her paintbrush, she feels a sense of calm. It’s clear these aren’t rehearsed speeches. “You’re very privileged to get to see a painting before it’s done because, almost, I mean, not almost, but nobody gets to see a painting before it’s done,” she tells Herzberg as she approaches a painting she’s started, her words calling to mind writers being advised not to talk about what they’re writing since doing so may rob them of their impetus. After describing some of her techniques and plans for imagery, she gestures at a blank area on the canvas and says she won’t reveal what she’ll put there. “I don’t give it all away.”
Mion’s childhood is her source material. She compares the elements from her childhood drawings to her current paintings and points out how she continues to paint the same subject matter. “Big eyes, weird grin, blonde hair. My brother and me. He’s a normal person. I’m a clown.” She brings the childhood drawing up to the painting in front of her, a self-portrait as a crucified clown, “Same hat.”
Mion drew as a child, studied with the painter Sidney Willis of New Hampshire, completed two years at Paier College of Art in Connecticut, freelanced, is represented in a Santa Fe gallery, and shows regularly. In Herzberg’s documentary, we get to watch Mion mix and then roll paint onto canvas. She comments that she stops her application when she “[likes] the texture” and that she is “really picky” about the surface. Although her relationship to the paint is sensual (she sticks her nose into a jar of paint to investigate, perhaps to determine whether the paint has gone bad or maybe just because she likes the smell) and she likes the wetness of oil paint and being able to move it around—”that’s luscious”—she is not into impasto (heavy application of paint). It’s not unusual for her to present crudely rendered imagery, some imbued with messiness, with extremely smooth glazes, almost as if her painting surfaces have been finished with a fine sanding. In her early works, her application of paint can vary wildly. In her US presidents series, the style of each portrait adds to her commentary—ranging from traditional portraiture, through a representation of stained glass, or inkblot, to cartoon imagery. In The Last Harvey Girls (2005), to create their portraits she gives much painterly attention to the women’s faces but not their hands, the cake approaches abstraction, and the filigree of the doorway gate is rendered in the delicate, careful realism of Mion’s seashells, wishbones, and paper valentines in her small works on paper. In Arrogance (2007), the figures sit on the surface, like cutouts against a painted backdrop, suggesting a certain garish, circus element. In her newer 2019-2022 paintings, she continues to draw on her personal dreamscape but a maturing of style and some coalescing of the rough edges of her various paint applications is evident. The figures in The Theater of Memory (2020) blend softly, emerging rather than being imposed on the landscape, as do the figures in Precipice (2019), a desert landscape, where it’s largely Mion’s use of color that brings to the fore the outlandishness of a foursome seated around a card table perched on a sandstone pillar.
Despite her interest in political activism—she and her husband met while advocating for peace and global nuclear disarmament; they put pressure on local authorities to shut down bars that served intoxicated patrons and pushed for the opening of an alcohol detox center in Winslow—Mion seems less socially aware than one would think. In her “Transfigurations” talk she gave in 2022, she introduces several paintings as if she were making powerful critiques of racial injustice, but the paintings are more nods to social issues than informed statements. One painting, of a middle-aged African American couple standing in front of their car in an empty landscape, is titled Green Book, Orange Balloon. The Green Book, created and published between 1936 and 1966 as a response to segregation and Jim Crow laws, safely guided African Americans to businesses on US roadways that would serve them. The Green Book was largely known only to African Americans, and Mion’s painting, much like the white savior movie, Green Book (2018), doesn’t add anything to the national conversation about anti-black racism. Dream On could be viewed as exploitative. In a familiar landscape (bleak desert with abandoned building, USA) a television in the foreground depicts Martin Luther King’s 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. Without the artist’s slide show commentary, a viewer would not readily understand the political statement Mion thinks she is making. Although she concerns herself with history, her historical knowledge can be cursory. In a talk she gave in 2001, she praised presidential rivals John Quincy Adams (for fighting against slavery) and Andrew Jackson as having both been “good presidents who did good things for our country.” Winslow, where Mion lived at the time, is a stone’s throw from Hopi and Navaho tribal lands and surrounded by ancestral lands of Native Americans so her uninformed and blithe approval of Andrew Jackson might be seen as willful ignorance. I believe Mion cares about but does not greatly concern herself with social injustice. This threadlike skimming of the surface regarding the issues of our day runs through her work. I wonder if Mion’s preoccupation with her own survival precludes her from going beneath the surface about things outside her own life experience. Certainly, the darkness in her work is personal, deeply felt, and expressed in uncensored imagery. It may be healthier for her to remain caught up in painting her dreams than to engage with destructive forces at work in our country.
Mion does not make beautiful paintings. Many of her paintings are dark, and some viewers find her work morbid. For Famous American Women Spoons (2005), Mion uses the trope of collectible spoons found in tourist shops. Installed over a grand fireplace, her large painting displays a lineup of spoons depicting Lizzie Borden (murdered her parents), Typhoid Mary (spread typhoid), Mary Surratt (accused of conspiring with John Wilkes Boothe in the assassination of President Lincoln), Mrs. O’Leary (believed to be the culprit of starting the 1871 Chicago fire), and the artist herself, suggesting that the path to fame for women is to become a villain or a scapegoat. Her second spoon painting, Spectacular Death Spoons (e.g., Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, Steve Irwin), depicts the author being eaten by a lion, and in her third spoon painting, Mion is crushed by an elephant. It seems a newsworthy death can also be a path to fame. That Mion depicts her deaths as ludicrous might be her way of saying she doesn’t intend to achieve fame through a spectacular death.
Mion takes things out of the shadows. Largely unnoticed by art critics, she is an example of an artist who offers a body of work that we must reckon with on our own without being told by the art world what to look at, what to think, how to assess. Mion’s work reminds us to consider how we overlook ourselves and forget to consider not our aspirational dreams, but the dreams that come to us in sleep and hallucinations, the dreams that emerge in our darkest times. Guerra’s film, Embrace of the Serpent, is a tribute to the Cohiuano and the sacredness of dreams. Karamakate points out that the Western scientists have lost touch with themselves. They claim to be seeking the rare yakuna plant for its hallucinogenic and medicinal properties but both have ulterior motives fueled by greed. It may be that Mion’s modest art world achievements ensure that she will not lose touch with herself and will continue to access her subconscious. Mion is a reminder that we might study unknown artists and consider whether their bodies of work can tell us something we don’t know.
In Herzberg’s documentary, Mion says, “If I can paint it, then maybe I can understand it.” In her public statement regarding one of her largest paintings, A New Year’s Party in Purgatory for Suicides in Which Liberace Makes a Guest Appearance Down from Heaven Just for the Hell of It (2004), she writes, “…[in] 1306 Dante Alighieri [in his Divine Comedy] consigned suicides to Hell’s second lowest level. I take a more compassionate look at suicides and invite them to this party.” She goes on to state that suicide needs to be depicted and discussed, and that doing so is a public service—“I hope this helps.” Elsewhere, in commentary posted on the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery website, Mion reveals that she “was having a difficult time detaching” from the suicides painting. There are clues that Mion’s mother and grandmother suffered from depression and periods of poor mental health. Mion’s paintings depict suicidal ideation, and the Suicides painting suggests that she has found a way to live with her dreams and her dark times. In the canvas, peopled with historical suicides in mostly greys, blacks, and yellows and the aspect of their deaths—Arshile Gorky with a noose around his neck, Sylvia Plath wearing oven mitts, Judy Garland with a necklace of pills—Mion depicts herself in the lower right-hand corner, in a colorful green sweater, tooting a new year’s horn. When what comes to us in our sleep is disturbing or terrifying, we call this a nightmare as if somehow nightmares are not also dreams. Our dreams are powerful because they give us access to parts of ourselves we may be unfamiliar with and may want to avoid. Mion does not shy away from her dreams but allows her whole self to emerge in her art. Mion’s New Year’s Party in Purgatory seems a celebration of her choice to paint. And to live.
REFERENCES
- A New Year’s Party In Purgatory For Suicides by Tina Mion. Short film by David Herzberg. Mion/Herzberg, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks84xDyHywo. Accessed: 01/10/23
- Creating a Sense of Place by Investing in Historic Buildings. Presentation by Allen Affeldt, July 26, 2020. www.pechakucha.com/presentations/creating-a-sense-of-place-by-investing-in-historic-buildings-291. Accessed: 01/12/23
- Electing to Face the Race Quirkily by Cathy Curtis. Nov. 5, 1996, 12 AM PT, Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-11-05-ca-61301-story.html. Accessed: 01/10/23
- Embrace of the Serpent. Film by Ciro Guerra. 2016.
- First Lady Images. NPR Morning Edition interview of Tina Mion by Susan Stamberg. January 22, 2001. www.npr.org/2001/01/22/1117390/first-lady-images. Accessed 01/13/23.
- Glory. Commentary by Tina Mion. The Outwin. portraitcompetition.si.edu/exhibition/2006-outwin-boochever-portrait-competition/glory?lang=eng. Accessed: 01/12/23
- Holy Ghosts. Tina Mion Solo Exhibition. October 7 – November 12, 2022. Kouri + Carrao Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. www.artsy.net/show/kouri-plus-corrao-gallery-holy-ghosts/info; www.artsy.net/show/kouri-plus-corrao-gallery-holy-ghosts?sort=partner_show_position. Accessed 01/14/23
- La Posada, a play by Micki Shelton. Theater Arts Studio reading, March 8, 2021. www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=273211734206035. Accessed: 01/11/23
- Presidential Playing Cards: The Art of Tina Mion. Youtube video. Hoover Presidential Library, 2001. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UCAxtpSLtY. Accessed: 01/10/23
- The 175-Year History of Speculating About President James Buchanan’s Bachelorhood: Was his close friendship with William Rufus King just that, or was it evidence that he was the nation’s first gay chief executive? by Thomas Balcerski, August 27, 2019. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/175-year-history-examining-bachelor-president-james-buchanans-close-friendship-william-rufus-king-180972992/. Accessed: 01/10/23
- Tina Mion: Behind the Studio Door. Documentary film by David Herzberg, 2012. Mion/Herzberg, 2011. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAW0kXSTWGc. Accessed: 01/05/23
- Transfigurations in the Art of Tina Mion. Santa Fe. April 26, 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAdGpXF2LOk. Accessed: 01/10/23
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lia Smith is a novelist, has had short stories published in national magazines and literary journals, and is seeking a publisher for her novels, Modine and A Perfect Wife. A collection of passenger drawings, operator portraits, B&W line drawings of bus stops, operator interviews, and artist “meditations,” Muni Is My Ride, on which she collaborated with artist Keith Ferris, will be published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press November 2023. She lives in San Francisco.
