The work with Doman did not occur outside ordinary family life. During those years, my second son was born, and later my daughter, Zoya. Each child entered the same home with a different way of meeting the world. My second son proved exceptionally intelligent and creative; abilities that had required years of deliberate labor with Doman appeared in him with astonishing ease. Zoya was playful, deeply sensitive, energetic, and courageous. Her presence had its own distinct force.
The differences among them made motherhood more complex, not less. Doman’s needs were immense and urgent, but urgency could not be allowed to decide whose inner life mattered. I had to care for him without making the other children invisible. Fairness could not mean giving each child the exact same thing; it meant trying to perceive each one accurately enough to understand what love required there.
My second son’s ease of learning brought relief and wonder, but it also sharpened the responsibility to see him as himself. He could not be treated merely as the child who required less, just as Doman could not be reduced to the child who required more. Their difference was not a comparison from which one of them should emerge superior; it was a demand that I remain alert to two distinct lives developing under the same roof.
I did not always possess the emotional balance this demanded. The repetitions of teaching, the uncertainty, and the continuous responsibility could disturb me deeply. Art began to call me back, not as a professional ambition, but as an inner necessity. I needed a place where feeling could move without first becoming useful to someone else. Painting preserved a part of me from disappearing entirely into care, and that inward space helped me return to my children with greater steadiness.
I painted at night and worked with them during the day. Proper equipment was less important than the need to make an image. When canvas was unavailable, I painted on copper vessels and sheets, radiographic film, leather from worn shoes, cardboard, pastry boxes, and other discarded surfaces. My respect for nature made reuse meaningful to me, but there was also a practical freedom in it. A material already dismissed by the world carried no demand for prestige; it could simply receive the work.
The rhythm of those years divided my life without separating it. Daylight belonged largely to movement, teaching, care, and the immediate claims of the children. At night, color allowed the pressure accumulated through those duties to change form. The paintings did not remove responsibility; they returned me to it with an inner life that had not been entirely used up.
Zoya seemed to understand this freedom instinctively. I never taught her how to paint, yet her modern drawings astonished me. Her ability did not appear as careful imitation; it had the directness of a child who had not learned to distrust the truth of her own marks. Even when she was young, she could see a difference in my paintings that I sometimes struggled to see myself.
“When you paint freely,” she would tell me, “what is inside you appears more truthfully.”
Her words were simple, but they reached the center of the artistic question I had carried since refusing college. Freedom was not valuable merely because it opposed rules; it mattered when it removed what stood between inner experience and form. Zoya recognized that truth without needing to explain it at length. Her perception became part of the way I understood my own work.
7. A House of Different Children
7. A House of Different Children
The work with Doman did not occur outside ordinary family life. During those years, my second son was born, and later my daughter, Zoya. Each child entered the same home with a different way of meeting the world. My second son proved exceptionally intelligent and creative; abilities that had required years of deliberate labor with Doman appeared in him with astonishing ease. Zoya was playful, deeply sensitive, energetic, and courageous. Her presence had its own distinct force.
The differences among them made motherhood more complex, not less. Doman’s needs were immense and urgent, but urgency could not be allowed to decide whose inner life mattered. I had to care for him without making the other children invisible. Fairness could not mean giving each child the exact same thing; it meant trying to perceive each one accurately enough to understand what love required there.
My second son’s ease of learning brought relief and wonder, but it also sharpened the responsibility to see him as himself. He could not be treated merely as the child who required less, just as Doman could not be reduced to the child who required more. Their difference was not a comparison from which one of them should emerge superior; it was a demand that I remain alert to two distinct lives developing under the same roof.
I did not always possess the emotional balance this demanded. The repetitions of teaching, the uncertainty, and the continuous responsibility could disturb me deeply. Art began to call me back, not as a professional ambition, but as an inner necessity. I needed a place where feeling could move without first becoming useful to someone else. Painting preserved a part of me from disappearing entirely into care, and that inward space helped me return to my children with greater steadiness.
I painted at night and worked with them during the day. Proper equipment was less important than the need to make an image. When canvas was unavailable, I painted on copper vessels and sheets, radiographic film, leather from worn shoes, cardboard, pastry boxes, and other discarded surfaces. My respect for nature made reuse meaningful to me, but there was also a practical freedom in it. A material already dismissed by the world carried no demand for prestige; it could simply receive the work.
The rhythm of those years divided my life without separating it. Daylight belonged largely to movement, teaching, care, and the immediate claims of the children. At night, color allowed the pressure accumulated through those duties to change form. The paintings did not remove responsibility; they returned me to it with an inner life that had not been entirely used up.
Zoya seemed to understand this freedom instinctively. I never taught her how to paint, yet her modern drawings astonished me. Her ability did not appear as careful imitation; it had the directness of a child who had not learned to distrust the truth of her own marks. Even when she was young, she could see a difference in my paintings that I sometimes struggled to see myself.
“When you paint freely,” she would tell me, “what is inside you appears more truthfully.”
Her words were simple, but they reached the center of the artistic question I had carried since refusing college. Freedom was not valuable merely because it opposed rules; it mattered when it removed what stood between inner experience and form. Zoya recognized that truth without needing to explain it at length. Her perception became part of the way I understood my own work.