With the outbreak of the corona, and with it the first closure in March 2020, when huge queues lined up in front of art supplies stores, artist Reut Asimini had to settle for the pile of papers left in her home in Tel Aviv and some paints and pencils - the rest remained in the studio.
Her daughter Mia, then a year and a half old, made her first steps in drawing in those days, and the closure gave Asimini the opportunity to observe this development closely.
"Like any mom," says Asimini, "I looked at her first drawings in admiration. I saw the evolution of the line - short lines that started to lengthen over time. An eye attached to the side, attached to the page. She drew a lot, and I realized we were going to have trouble supplying the pages. So I looked at her listing, saw that there was room on the page, and added a gymnast.
"I did not think about the long term in those moments: the house was upside down, piles of laundry, and I looked at my partner, who would understand that I had to ignore everything that was happening around me and be in the moment. "I did not paint butterflies and flowers. There is a lot of anxiety there. In many drawings I recognize how I told her in the painting what I was afraid of."
The special body
As the closure continued, the joint records became a permanent matter, a kind of diary or visually illuminated of the mother and daughter during an epidemic.
Some of the mother's drawings are a kind of interpretation of the daughter's drawings: what looks like nonsense becomes a gymnast's film, a sheet, a glacial landscape, a pit.
But gradually Asimini's drawings begin to become more reflexive.
She draws pins on the scribble, as if her drawing came to tighten the messy hairs beneath it, or she draws near the scribbled lines a comb that seems to "comb" them.
"At first I asked: what is it that I do - I continue it? I interpret it? Where do I allow her line to be, and where do I catch her with pins. This question - how much do I comb her line and how much do I leave it - that's the question I ask. "As a mother, how much I allow and how I educate."
In the introduction to the book, called "Mia and I", art historian Maria H. Lou compares the work of Asimini and her daughter to the joint works of the surrealists in France in the period between the two world wars.
They developed a game called "The Exquisite Corpse", in which one participant draws a body on paper and folds it so that it hides part of it, and then continues the drawing so that what is obtained can eventually turn out to be a woman-style figure with ducks and legs from tennis rackets .
But unlike the surrealist games, which are based on eroticism and nonsense, in Asimini the co-creation becomes an emotional profile of mother-daughter relationship.
"It was like having a conversation with someone whose language you do not know, because you do not speak the language of the babies," she says.
"During the day, especially in closures, we went through a lot as parents, and the end of the day became a therapeutic moment where I told Mia what I was going through."
Did you show her the drawings you drew on her paintings?
"Only now am I starting to show her. I showed her one, and then she wanted to fiddle with it."
She wanted to continue the conversation.
"Right, and I allowed her. Then I decided to keep the drawings as correct for that moment. Today I no longer have room to write myself in her drawings, she fills the whole page. She is already three and a half years old, she tells what she writes. One day she told me about "Her painting, 'Mom, look, smile' - and then my heart broke, because I realized that a period is over. This painting, of the smile, is also the painting that seals the book."
Do you think that in her drawings she imitated you?
"I did not paint by hand. I was afraid of imitation. Sometimes gardeners have a tendency to teach to paint too early, and then children come back from kindergarten with knowledge of how to draw a heart, for example. For me it always breaks the heart. I would paint only after she went to sleep. This is the sentence from which the exhibition begins. (Opens these days at the Petah Tikva Museum, and is based on the drawings in the book and other drawings; KD): 'After you went to bed'.
I see in the children's paintings moments of innocence that disappear.
It has always saddened me that children's paintings are the most discarded paintings in the world.
The most diligent mothers keep some, but most parents throw them in the trash. "
Reverse imitation
The joint work with her daughter also led to a turnaround in the work of Asimini herself, who had previously turned from painting to other areas. Shortly before the closure, her solo exhibition at the Artists' House in Tel Aviv went down, which included ceramic works and video installations - not drawings. "As I became more learned I moved away from painting, painting lost its joy. Art schools can kill the initial instinct you come up with. Painting is the medium with the most history, so I found more space in other mediums."
Another change lies in the universal dimension of these drawings. In her previous works, Asimini was drawn to questions about her identity as Israeli and Oriental. She lived for seven years in the United States, during which time she completed a master's degree at Hunter College in New York, and in her work dealt, among other things, with her insistence on forcing Americans to pronounce her first name, Reut, and not change it to an easier-to-pronounce name. But now she says: The epidemic caused identities to blur again. Motherhood is a universal thing, and so is the plague. "
Before that I had a lot of self-criticism, I did not want to paint things that were banal or clichéd. I started feeling jealous. "
Do you think of your intervention in terms of envy, of reverse imitation?
"Jealousy is a charged term in the relationship between mothers and daughters. It was not that I wanted to be like her, but that I had a longing for something that would never happen again. People around me laughed that I was taking advantage of it. The invasion was a part of our lives.As I was looking for papers to draw on, and I did not have, we all lived in a problem of space and space.
"Mia's page was a safe haven for me. Not only because my works had previously dealt with biography and various bedding - plates, dresses, etc. - but also because her page had value in the world, as a children's painting, and I told myself, that way I would never throw it away. My registration. I will be committed to it. "
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
If you found an error in the article, we'll be happy for you to share it with us