Introducing Kathryn Brock, Artist

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Erin Nanasi is an avid underwater basket weaver, with a penchant for satire and the odd wombat reference.
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Kathryn Brock was born in Aurora, Illinois on January 1st, 1943. She was the eldest child of Doris and John Corkery. Doris was a stay home mom and John was in the advertising business. Eventually, Kathryn, or Kitch, as she was called, would be joined by two sisters, Molly and Mary.

Kitch was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in her teens, and suffered from the disease until her death in 2008. Kitch was a gifted artist, writer and gourmet cook, never letting her pain stand in the way of expressing herself through art. Kitch Brock was also my mother.

My mom created some of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen. She went through phases like most artists, visiting cubism, realism, abstract art and even tried collage. But she excelled in portraits and still life. In fact, the painting my dad featured on the cover of her memorial booklet is a heart wrenching portrait of her life in shoes. It starts with her “party shoes”: black, sparkly high heeled strappy pumps, and then your eye wanders. You find yourself looking at orthopedic shoes, black and sinister, all the way up to the last “shoes” she was able to wear; a pair of Land’s End white bedroom slippers, with the sides cut out to make room for her crippled toes.

Mom painted me a lot. I have paintings hanging in our living room of me at age three, then as a young teenager, and a charcoal sketch of me again as a small child. My mom painted my father as well, a few times, with the last attempt being a portrait of him sitting, holding a newspaper, on my great grandmother’s sofa. He hates that painting, saying it makes him look odd. I love it, because she painted it. There are only a few paintings my mom created that I despise, and one of them I destroyed.

My mom’s childhood was less than idyllic, to put it mildly. At the age of five or six, my grandparents took her to a local orphanage and left her there. They came back, but in their minds, this was appropriate punishment for God knows what. My grandmother used to lay on the couch, pretending to be dead. My mom was beaten with canes, yardsticks, ping pong paddles and hands. And in response to this stress, my mom’s body turned against her. About ten years ago, my mom painted a portrait of my grandmother, long dead, and it was one of the most disturbing paintings she, or anyone, had ever created.

It showed my grandmother on a couch; in fact, my great grandmother’s couch that now resides in our living room. She was dressed to go out-suit jacket, skirt, low heel pumps and a hat. Grandma Dorie was pretending to be dead. She was surrounded by the implements of pain she used on my mother, books with strange titles and cigarettes floating above her head. It was a cathartic painting for my mom, and it hung in our home in Vermont, up until the day we moved.

I told myself the painting reminded me why my mother was the way she was, why she seemed incapable of love, why she made the decisions she did that led my dad to move us from San Diego to Minnesota. My mom sometimes used art to cleanse her soul, but had never painted anything this personal and this eerie, to my memory. It was a scary painting. I wrestled with whether or not I wanted to take this painting to our new home, and talked to my dad about what to do. He told me that he had taken a portrait my mom painted that had hung in the hallway of their Northern Virginia condo for almost two decades and destroyed it. He was not struck by lightning, a giant meteor did not crash down and crush his skull. It was, after all, just a painting.

So, on the day we had movers stomping in and out of our house, wrapping, packing, swearing, sweating, I took that painting of my grandmother out onto the driveway. I had a paring knife in my right hand. In minutes, the painting was shredded, broken, gone. It was as cathartic a moment for me as painting it had been for my mother. No insanity in my new house.

I had to think about which of my mom’s paintings to use with this article, and I chose one she did of me, holding my son when he was just a baby. I love this painting, because it’s filled with love and beauty. It reminds me that my mother was a truly gifted artist, and she painted, more often than not, people and things she loved. Sometimes, she painted darkness and pain, because that’s what she felt. That’s why she was an artist.