ABBEY GOLDEN : MY YEAR AT HOME 

Essay by Cintra Wilson

While she has always had a fascination with dappled light — there are many swimming pools and tree-shaded pickleball courts in her previous works — in her new series, “My Year at Home,” the artist Abbey Golden, who gave birth to twins during the Covid pandemic, turns away from the outdoor world and paints her inner landscape over 12 months of new motherhood, to give the viewer a velvety faceful of how it feels to be physically, spiritually, emotionally and psychologically weighed down by these primal obligations and radical personal changes.

Inspired by a reclining figure of a woman with a baby painted in 1906 by the expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, the artist sees herself as a kind of existentially exhausted Venus of Willendorf, unmoving across twelve canvases as life bustles around, behind, and sometimes crawling on top of her.  Within the comforting, warm, snug interiors, these images are portraits of not just of post-natal depression, but also of the body-horror of physical change and the artist’s very sense of identity in flux.  The fuzzy boundaries between the bodies of herself and her family members is an abrupt new sensation that isn’t always pleasant;  from Golden’s perspective, her family is a tangle of limbs that  all connect to her.  It’s all a blobby, hazy blur when the rubber hits the road in human interconnectivity, not to mention a whopping identity crisis. 

The repetition in the 12 paintings is representative of the artist’s feeling of being stuck in the repetitive doldrums of being a feeding machine for her babies, and the terror of falling short in her role as the engine at the epicenter of her family system, as a mother and as a female person in general.  The underlying message of this series, says Golden, is the “somewhat hard realization that creating life doesn’t give meaning to your own.”  The reclining figures in several of the paintings have distinctly hinky, mistrustful expressions — a side-eye reflecting the fear of being unable to live up to societal expectations, and the profound guilt related to doing anything mildly transgressive (smoking, drinking) that would corrupt her mission as a life-nurturing mother, and the fear that she’s doing everything wrong. 

“It’s a primal pose, almost fetal,” Golden says of the figures. “These (paintings) aren’t meant to be seductive or empowering.  They are not for the male gaze.  A younger me couldn’t have made this series.  I was too insecure,” says Golden. 

In her previous series, “Golden Age of Fluidity” and “Golden Years,” Golden looked outside of herself and found her voluptuous and distinctive palette — teals juxtaposed with muted fuchsias, pinks and soft purples — and repeating shapes that evoked a kind of nostalgia for vacation settings in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.  There is an echo of this kind of tropical leisure at play, even in “My Year At Home,” only now the mother figure is collapsed in the middle of bocce ball and tennis courts, seemingly from the existential weight of everything.  The setting in Golden’s world is as benign and sunny as it has been in her earlier work; the weather is nice, the grass is green.  Only the figure at the center of the painting is the problem — this mother, this vessel, this uncomfortably rounded bag of organs, refuses to get up off the court, the floor, the bed. The figure refuses to compete or perform; she’s not playing the game anymore — any of them.  These collapsed figures are driven, according to Golden, by “apathy, paranoia and resignation.”  She’s not playing house anymore — she has become the house — the unmoving locus of all family activity. The central figure is quietly breaking under the burden of the entire patriarchy, and the whole concept of womanhood.  She has sacrificed her previous self to become her family unit’s most vital piece of infrastructure — a flesh machine.  She is psychologically, physically and psychically undone, almost to the point of being inanimate, or inhuman; almost like being a large ham. 

In the midst of all this existential female turmoil, Golden’s sense of humor is still evident; her perhaps grudging pleasure in motherhood is also palpable. 

Her fetishizable renditions of babies with pneumatic little butts scamper around the canvases like putti, unaware of their mother’s plight; they nurse on her body at times like puppies.  Her womblike interiors are safe and cozy spaces, suffused with California light -  but, as if she was sealed inside of a whole fruit, the artist is suffocating.  This is the drudgery of love — the work of motherhood which reduces women down to their purely biological functions, as all other aspects of identity are sidelined.  Her exterior is no longer just her own, and her interior suffers for it; no matter how many loved ones are close, the mother’s ordeal is private, and harrowing.

What this series really gives the viewer is a powerful sense of the sea change that happened in Golden, and her fight to reclaim herself after the biological deluge that overwhelmed her.  She confronts the swollen, messy, and tormenting aspects of her inescapable state as the mother of multiple infants with latent eroticism and silent screaming — but the world is still unmistakably from the hand of Abbey Golden.  Her colors, her Rubenesque figures, her Western light.   This is the most intimate and personal of all of Golden’s series — she truly painted her own innermost interior, with all of the beauty, complexity, and problems it includes.  “My Year At Home” is an exciting leap in Golden’s evolution as a painter, a woman, and a human being.