Previously…
Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.
The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Kelly Mudd recorded on January 10, 2033 at her home in Black Mountain, North Carolina six months prior to her death.
MM: Where did you go when you disappeared before that first big show, Daedalia’s New York premiere?
KM: For the first two weeks, I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in a budget motel on the other side of town. That’s not what you imagined, right? I was still just a kid then. I had lots of imagination when it came to drawing but I had very little in my real life. I’d barely seen anything of the world.
MM: What did you do during those two weeks?
KM: I ate a lot of takeout food and watched a lot of television. I was like a kid on summer break. I just wanted to be a vegetable and catch my breath. I had pushed myself really hard because I didn’t want to disappoint Lefty. Eventually, though, I got bored and I did something very out of character. I bought a one-way ticket to Italy.
I know it seems embarrassingly on the nose for an artist to make their first trip abroad be Florence, but it was a radical thing for me. I came across the movie A Room with a View during that marathon of watching TV and I fell in love with the landscape and the light. You have to understand, I had a rural high school education and no idea that Tuscany was the birthplace of art in the Western world. When I saw a documentary about da Vinci a couple of days later, that sealed the deal for me.
MM: So even though you had said you were done with art, you really weren’t. Did you know that at the time?
KM: Oh, I think so. I could no more stop making art than I could cut off my hand. I was just being dramatic. From the minute I got off the plane and took the train from Rome to Florence, I couldn’t stop sketching. I covered both sides of a stack of cocktail napkins, and cursed myself for not bringing a sketchpad.
The first couple of nights I stayed in a youth hostel like someone who didn’t have a stack of traveler’s checks tucked away in my backpack.
MM: What are traveler’s checks?
KM: Ha, you wouldn’t know that, would you? Your generation does everything on your phone. Traveler’s checks were what you got when you planned to travel abroad as an American. They were safer than carrying cash.
MM: Weird. So what did you do when you got there?
KM: I did what every tourist does when they go to Florence. I visited the Uffizi Gallery, walked through the Duomo, and of course saw the statue of David. All of it was amazing, the food, the smells, and the people. But it wasn’t until I made the pilgrimage to Vinci that I really fell in love. I rode on a bus with a bunch of German tourists and planned for it to just be a day trip, but I ended up missing the bus back to Florence. I was so taken by what I saw in that museum. Da Vinci was such a weirdo, completely out of his time. I spent hours staring at his obscure little sketches and the bizarre and creepy things that came out of his brain. When I finally looked up, they were closing the museum and the bus had left without me.
One of the older women who worked there took pity on me and offered up the spare room in her house for the night. Rosa, her name was. She was so sweet. She fed me homemade pesto and I had never tasted anything so divine. The next day, she connected me with a family friend who rented me a villa when I returned with my stuff. I ended up staying there for three months. It was one of the most magical times in my life.
MM: What made it so special?
KM: You’ve been there, you know. The light has a quality, especially in autumn, that is like nowhere else in the world. I would sit for hours in an olive grove on a blanket just taking in the light, watching how it changed over the course of an afternoon. At the end of the day, all any artist does is pay attention to the light. It was healing for me, I think, to be in such a different place all on my own with no one to answer to.
MM: What was your relationship to your work then? Did you know what was happening back in the states?
KM: Oh no, I had no idea. You have to remember we had no internet at the time and no phones. How would I have known?
MM: So for however long you were away in Europe, you had no idea your work was completely exploding in the art world?
KM: That’s right, and I’m so grateful for that. There are few things worse for an artist than that kind of success. I was completely oblivious and utterly happy.
MM: I don’t think I’ve ever seen any work you did from that period. Did you do any pieces or was it all just sketching?
KM: No, I didn’t want to make anything big. I wanted to go inside, deeper. I needed time to understand what my relationship was to the gift I’d been given, to the collaboration I had stumbled upon.
MM: You’re talking about Ona now, right?
KM: Yes. Yes I am. And I can see in your eyes you believe I’m a lunatic. That’s okay. It’s never mattered much to me that others, even you, understand my relationship with her. She opened doorways for me to walk through and it wasn’t until later when I came home that I understood she was opening doorways for others too. Anyone who saw our work, really took the time to see it, found a door they could pass through or a window they could open to have a different view. What is it? What are you thinking?
MM: It just struck me, the great irony of your life. Commercially, you never got credit for your work, which seems like a crime, but in a way, if what you say about Ona is true, then maybe you don’t deserve credit for it. I mean, if it’s not just you making the art.
KM: It’s true and it’s the reason I was able to accept the arrangement Lefty and I made. I had an intuition about it that I can’t explain and that intuition was right. By letting go of my attachment to it, my ownership of it, the work could become about more than just me.
MM: Did you communicate with Lefty at all during that year and a half?
KM: I didn’t and if I have one regret, it’s that. He was worried sick about me, had no way to know if I was okay, no way to know if he’d ever see me again.
MM: But he had quite the payday from that show. That must have been some consolation. I can’t see him being too grief-stricken.
KM: You’re too hard on him. He’s not what you think. And you know, every penny of my share was waiting for me when I did finally come back. He had receipts for every sale and had put my share into a separate account.
MM: Tell me what that was like, when you saw him after all that time.
KM: Well, I didn’t know if he would even talk to me. I didn’t know if he would still be there at all. I didn’t even know if my little house would still be mine. When I walked out of that life, part of the reason I could was because I didn’t feel I had any claim to it. So I fully expected to come home to nothing and to have to start all over again.
But when the taxi dropped me at my place in the canyon, my key still worked in the door and everything was just like I’d left it. Well, not exactly. The pieces for the New York show were gone, of course.
MM: So he had what, just kept paying the mortgage and the bills while you were gone?
KM: Yeah, that’s Lefty. He had faith I would come back. Even the phone was still hooked up. After I got all my bags inside, I sat down at my desk and I called him. When he picked up, he didn’t say anything at first. There was just this silence and I imagined him seeing the caller ID and thinking I was a ghost calling him. An hour later he was there in my living room, larger than life. I remember he hugged me for a really long time and when he finally let me go, he just looked at me. There was a difference in the way he saw me and I could feel it.
MM: What do you mean?
KM: I don’t know what he saw. I only liked that he saw me, finally.
MM: That pair of photographs in the frame at the end of the mantel, were those taken around that time?
KM: Can you hand them down to me so I can look? You know my eyes are shit now, just like everything else. [Kelly studies photos in small book-matched frame] Yeah, that was me in Rome a month before I flew back home.
MM: What do you see when you look at these pictures? Can you describe yourself, I mean like you would if you were painting someone else?
KM: I see a confident, young woman. Her arms that were once almost translucent and skeletal are now bronzed and muscular. She looks as if she belongs, as if the body she was renting, she finally owns. Look there. You see the hand on her hip, the arch of her spine. It’s playful, unafraid.
MM: So that’s who he saw that afternoon when he came to your house?
KM: I think so. You’d have to ask him.
MM: Do you think that’s when he fell in love with you?
KM: Oh no, he’d always loved me just like I’d always loved him. Love doesn’t happen in a minute. You don’t catch it like some virus. I think it’s always there waiting, the potential for it anyway. But yes, to your point, things changed when I got back. I can’t explain in a way that you can understand what it felt like.
MM: You mean coming back to all that success or being with Lefty again?
KM: All of it. It was as if I had crawled away from L.A. a caterpillar and returned as a butterfly. That sounds dumb, but it’s true. It was a transformation. I stepped into another life.
MM: What was the biggest change? I know you’re getting tired and I’ll let you rest after this last question. Tell me a memory from that time that can help me see it like you did.
KM: Some water, please. I need to think about it. Let’s see, a couple of days after I was home and had settled in, he picked me up and took me to the offices he had set up above a restaurant in Venice. On the walls he had hung a series of framed documents. There were some clippings from reviews in the New Yorker and the Paris Review but what I found astonishing was the handwritten letters, some of them from people who had bought my pieces but the ones that really moved me were from people who had not been able to. They had just seen them at one of the gallery shows or hanging in someone’s home.
The letters were so raw, so personal. They weren’t gushing about the work. They were talking about their lives and what they had seen of themselves in this painting or that one.
I see that look on your face. I know it well. You look like you’re trying to swallow some undercooked chicken I just served you.
MM: I’m sorry. It’s just hard for me to believe. You know I love your work…
KM: But you’ve never experienced it the way these people did, right?
MM: No, I haven’t. I’ve tried for as long as I can remember but I’ve always felt like it’s some club I’m not a part of or maybe I’m just not smart enough or open enough or…
KM: I’m sorry. Marabelle, I’m sorry. I assure you it’s none of those things. Can I tell you a story? Would that be okay?
MM: Yes, of course.
KM: It’s one I heard years and years ago when I was traveling through Poland. It was told to me by this genteel old man. We were sitting outside a coffee shop early one morning. He was the only other customer and he struck up a conversation with me the way older people do who tend to be so lonely. He was a writer who collected stories in a little leatherbound notebook. I asked him to read me one. I’m not sure why he chose this one, but he did and it’s always stuck with me.
It was about a master clockmaker who crafted these intricate timepieces, each one a marvel that could capture the dance of the stars, that’s how he put it. They would take months, even years for him to complete, hunched over his bench. But in perfecting these clocks that brought utility and wonder to those people of a certain class who could afford them, he completely lost track of time, the precious time he could have spent with his wife, their children, their friends.
To them, his clocks, whenever they would see them in some great hall, were nothing but a reminder of his absence. They didn’t capture the dance of the stars. They were just a pair of hands that stole minutes, hours, days, and years from a man they never really got to know.
MM: Jesus, that’s a terrible story.
KM: Yeah, I suppose it is. Most true stories are.
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Haunting story, Ben. It's a lovely metaphor for any multifaceted creative life - how to find that balance of passion to create with simply being human (family, friendships). Which is explored movingly in that film, "The Turning Point," about the two ballerinas, one who chose family and the other who chose to dance. What we must sacrifice if we can't find a balance of both. . . . Now I wonder if "MM" is Kelly's daughter . . . hmmm.
So mysterious Ben. I’m scratching my chin…so not everyone can feel/see/know themselves through Kelly’s paintings, huh. And those that can, it’s almost a kind of completion or returning to something they’d lost. And what that has to do with her story about the clockmaker? Ahhhh…I need to sit with this a bit!