Mother Musing by Elaine Gantz Wright
When I think of my mother, artist Ann Cushing Gantz, the pungent scent of turpentine spirits instantly envelopes me, overwhelming every sense. I recall how the acrid elixir would hang in the air and cling to every surface in our traditional two-story house in Dallas, Texas. My mother, an intellectually passionate painter and printmaker, was deeply frustrated by the business side of the art world, feeling dismissed by its “naïve, philistine” tastemakers. Although my mother ran Cushing Galleries with several partners in the late 1960s and 1970s, she despised everything about marketing and selling art.
“They don’t really care about good art at all,” she’d opine. “They just want ‘cowboys on the prairie, ‘urine in the jar,' and ‘chocolate smeared on the wall.’”
She complained with vigor about affluent and influential collectors who were so “easily conned and seduced by trendy shock tactics.” I can still hear her say, “Taste has gone to Hades in a handbasket.”
My mother described her painting style as “realistic forms in abstract space.” She created lush scenes of European antiquities, children nestled in flowers, and esoteric still lifes. Her textured impasto technique accentuated every brushstroke in dimensional painterly colors that any Impressionist would have envied. More traditional than avant-garde, her eclectic repertoire ranged from acrylic paintings to “glaze drawings” (a medium she invented) to woodcuts. Her Dallas patrons, friends, and students adored them all.
Working occasionally in her private studio, a converted bedroom over the garage, she devoted most of her energy and time to managing her lively, entrepreneurial art conclave, Cushing Studio. Harnessing her trademark charismatic dazzle and expertise, she excelled at teaching painting to adults; yet she would tell you openly that she never wanted to be a teacher.
“I fell into it,” she claimed. “I did it because someone called me up and begged me to do it.”
Despite her fervent protests, my mother built a successful art studio and community, featuring a competitive juried exhibition series called The Atelier, lavish holiday events, and decades of student art shows—all in a funky mid-century modern office building on Central Expressway in Dallas. It was quite the operation, and she cultivated a devoted following, a curated coterie of artists, ranging from local beginners to internationally recognized professionals. I always felt my mother’s students were her chosen family and her preferred source of joy. Though this is a painful realization, accepting its truth helps me better understand her and feel more compassion for myself.
“I need to find more time to paint,” she would announce. Though her social commitments frequently competed with her artmaking, she found ways to combine them by contributing her work to Dallas’s elite charitable events, such as the Dallas Arboretum’s Madhatter’s Tea, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Beaux Arts Ball, and the Retina Foundation’s Racing for Sight. When preparing for a show or event, she would retreat into her home studio, a colorful cocoon of clutter and canvases in progress. As a little girl, I remember feeling totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of materials, paint tubes, easels, paintings, gesso cans, Turpentine containers, Masonite boards, boxes, buckets, books, magazines, sketchpads, palettes, jars, and brushes. She also liked to repurpose those brown glass B&M baked bean jars with the honeycomb design—to soak her paint-caked brushes. There were hundreds of them, everywhere you looked—messy and magical, like an overgrown garden of potted pigment.
With its potent odor, turpentine reminds me of grief. In fact, I can still catch a whiff of it when I open a book that once lived in her house for half a century. Grief, too, is like an accelerant, that flammable residue that CSI detects in the ashes after a horrific fire. It’s an unstable chemical compound that can ignite seemingly innocuous psychological debris in a flash, and the spontaneous combustion of new griefs with ancient wounds can make carrying a lifetime of losses unbearable.
It hardly seems possible that my mom has been gone for more than 13 years. She and we endured such a lengthy, harrowing struggle in the aftermath of her devastating, paralyzing stroke. No matter how complex the relationship with your mother might be, your life is never really the same after she is gone. Yet, in some ways, I am closer to her in death than I ever was in life. Now, I have a better understanding of her struggles and her frustrations. I feel more profound empathy, as I know how challenging and heartbreaking life can be.
I notice signs of her presence in the most surprising places. They are glimpses of grace. As an example, my dear neighbor, Tracy, regularly receives texts with photos of my mom’s paintings from her son, who is in the antique business. Whenever he spots her work at a Dallas estate sale, she forwards the texts to me. It's as if my mother is sending me winks, saying, “I am here, and you are not alone.” I love feeling the sprinkle of her sassy mischief.
And the artistic reach extends even further: Tracy’s son, Travis, and her ex-husband, Mike, happen to know my friend John, a fellow writing group member and long-time acquaintance. I was shocked when John told me he had met Mike and Travis independently and had discovered my mother’s paintings through them.
And there’s more. John helped my younger son, Ian, prepare for his move to Austin by purchasing several of my mom’s pieces from him. John and I are continuing to visit occasional estate sales together to track down her paintings, one through a classmate from elementary school. What an unexpected gift. The synchronistic threads keep my mother woven in my increasingly chaotic life as I continue to struggle with the loss of my firstborn son, Elliot, seven years ago. It’s a tangled web that offers a peculiar and sometimes heart-stopping brand of comfort.
And this very website connection has generated its own mystifying synchronicity. Andrea, the founder of TheArtistLives.org, reached out to me on LinkedIn when she saw my writing about grief. When we spoke, we found that one of her first featured artists, Rose Tobey, was also one of my mother’s most beloved art students and friends. As it turned out, Andrea needed help contacting Rose’s daughter to finalize the necessary paperwork to offer reproductions of Rose’s work on the website. Thanks to our joint detective work and precise dot connecting, we learned that in all of Manhattan, Rose’s daughter lived right across the street from Andrea. Gobsmacked was an inadequate description of our surprise. The spirits are among us, indeed. My mother is with me—just in a different kind of way. I feel it and am grateful.
This website is a sacred space for me, full of wonder, connection, and light—fueled by my mother’s legacy and forever presence. How grateful I am that it is part of my journey of grief, healing, creativity, and forever love: The universe at work and the grace of grief.
Elaine Gantz Wright is a writer, editor, and content creator living in Dallas, Texas. A divorced mother of two brilliant boys, one gone too soon, she writes to heal and help others feel less alone on the journey of unfathomable loss. Find her writing at Grief Matters/Substack, ElaineGantzWright.com, and @ellagantz on Instagram. She is a published essayist and poet in The Spirituality of Grief by Fran Tilton Shelton and House of Comfort and House of Faith from Retreat House Press. Her work is frequently featured on FaithandGrief.org and Faith and Grief’s podcast.