Untitled/Shirley Van Dusen

 

By Lisa Van Dusen

May 12, 2024

This piece was first published as an Ottawa Citizen column on Mother’s Day, 2000. Shirley Van Dusen is now 98, and still painting.

NEW YORK CITY – I walked the 45 blocks home from work on Fifth Avenue Thursday afternoon because it was one of those staggeringly glorious New York spring days that film directors either wait weeks to catch, or curse, the way they curse rainbows, because nobody will ever buy that it happened that way.

I stopped at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hung out among the Monets and the van Goghs because — I don’t care what anyone says — they get to me.

And I thought about my mother, who is also an artist.

I was at a fancy dress ball in Boston a few years back and a gentleman of a certain age, which, by the way, they never say about gentlemen, asked me to dance. As he manoeuvred me around the floor and as the full horror of his mistake was surely dawning on him, my partner, a Toronto real estate developer, asked whether I was Shirley Van Dusen’s daughter. I told him I was.

”Your mother’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”

This has happened more than once over the years. It wasn’t always on a dance floor, but always men in tuxedoes and usually after they’d had a few. My mother would dismiss these incidents as sloshy nostalgia for the road not taken.

When I was a kid, I never knew my mother was beautiful. She didn’t wear her beauty like a coat or pause a beat for it to be acknowledged by strangers. She had seven children to manage, which didn’t leave much time for self-consciousness. She also had the sort of talent that didn’t allow for vanity, because it was messy, smelly, and required a wardrobe mostly of my father’s castoff shirts, further done-in by paint. Because she didn’t seem to be aware of her beauty, I suppose we weren’t either.

She was a colonel’s daughter, a debutante, who was a fashion illustrator when she married my father – then a crack reporter at the now-defunct Ottawa Journal. She stopped painting when the older ones were old enough to eat her oils and didn’t start again until I was old enough not to. Give or take a few furtive classes, a 20-year hiatus.

During those years, she slopped us, scrubbed us and, whenever necessary, which was frequently, gave us the famous death glare. She knew how to say exactly the right things during every crisis, as though she was born with it, and she was always right where we’d left her.

My Mum, 98 and still painting/CTV Ottawa

It wasn’t until after I was old enough to really see her that I found out she was beautiful, but I remember the day her other secret hit me full force. It was years ago, a noisy Sunday at my parents’ house. All of the kids, the professional talkers, were on about whatever we were on about.

I sat down for a break, either benched or winded, and found myself staring at an amazing, 2,000-word landscape of Provence, where once there hadn’t been one, and knowing for the first time that while the rest of us were busy trying to out-wise each other, the genuine talent in the room was on the walls.

So, a few days before Mother’s Day, I stood in New York squinting at this smudgy cathedral because she taught me, back when I was so young I can’t remember how old I was, that sometimes you have to squint to see things clearly.

I thought about what it must be like to know you can produce something so beautiful and how you’d have to see the world that way in the first place to be able to convey it.

Sometimes my daughter sees colours where they shouldn’t be and that nobody else can see – purple trees, yellow clouds – and I know she’s not crazy because I’ve heard it before. And I know she wouldn’t be here if the woman she got that particular gift from hadn’t put it aside for what must have seemed an eternity.

So, aside from thanking her for everything else, I’d also like to thank her for not taking the road not taken.

Policy Magazine Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.