Tina Essmaker: THE EYE IS THE FIRST CIRCLE • Cleaver Magazine

Creative Nonfiction by Tina Essmaker
THE EYE IS THE FIRST CIRCLE

Seven weeks into gestation, the eye is the first circle. In darkness, the intricate anatomy begins to define itself. Sight will arrive later when the remaining forms take shape: the cornea, iris, pupil, lens, and retina.

I had ventured out on a muggy August afternoon to see Lee Krasner: In Living Colour, a retrospective of the Abstract Expressionist’s work at the Barbican. My morning tea plus the long ride across London on the Tube meant that as soon as I arrived at the museum, I had to use the bathroom. Inside the stall, I peed and wiped quickly, but something caught my eye: the tissue dotted with red.

Not again. I was hardly six weeks pregnant this time and knew spotting was usually normal, unless it wasn’t. I balled up the tissue and flushed it. At the sink, I let the hot water sting my skin while I contemplated leaving. This will be my last chance to see the show. I should stay. I dried my hands on my pants, fished my ticket out of my pocket, and left the bathroom.

Inside the gallery, I hurried toward a vacant bench and sat. Just breathe. I closed my eyes. Voices of passersby rose and fell like a chorus. I’m almost forty. Maybe I waited too long. Shoes tapped on tile, forming an erratic rhythm. I always said I didn’t want kids. Beads of sweat accumulated around my hairline. Maybe I’m not meant to be a mother. A sour taste crept up into my throat. Please don’t puke. I pressed my damp palms into my thighs and remembered.

The first time I had said it aloud was sixth grade. My friend Jenn and I were sprawled across her living room carpet where I watched her dump the contents of a bucket onto the floor: half-dressed and fully naked Barbies with knotted hair, sparkly dresses, hot pink heels, and shiny handbags. We chattered and sorted through the dolls and their accessories.

Jenn blurted out, “When I grow up, I’m gonna get married and have six kids—three boys and three girls! It’ll be just like The Brady Bunch. What about you?”

I gave a slight shrug and mumbled, “I dunno if I want kids.”

“You’ll change your mind,” she said.

I shrugged my shoulders about kids well into my late thirties.

When I opened my eyes moments later, warm sepia tones engulfed me from my seat on the bench. Thick brushstrokes beat across a sweeping canvas about eight feet tall and sixteen feet wide. Half-lidded eyes emerged from layers of amber, cream, and tan. I was no stranger to the work of Lee Krasner, but I had never seen this particular painting in person: The Eye Is the First Circle.

I knew Eye was part of Krasner’s Umber Paintings. The series, also called Night Journeys, was created between 1959 and 1962 during a period of mourning after she had lost both her husband, fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, and her mother over a short span of time. In the midst of grief, and perhaps the pressure she felt to carry on Pollock’s legacy, Krasner wrestled with bouts of insomnia.

Almost a year after Pollock’s death, Krasner moved her studio from the constrained spaces of their farmhouse into the barn where he formerly painted. On sleepless nights, she labored under the artificial light of her new workspace. Krasner’s eyes strained to see color under the fluorescent bulbs, so she switched to working with muted tones.

I imagined Krasner in the studio. Her feet might shuffle across the floor, her right arm swaying left and right, up and down, a brush affixed to her hand. Perhaps a lit cigarette dangles from her mouth. She stops, squints, and takes a drag. An orange glow pulses between her lips. Maybe in this moment she has the foresight to envision what will become her series of twenty-four masterful Umber Paintings. Or maybe the expansiveness she would uncover under her grief remains hidden to her.

More than a decade before I sat on the bench in front of Krasner’s Eye painting, I had hoped to become an artist, not with paint, but with words. The desire remained within me. Like Krasner, I wanted to use my medium to illuminate a rich interior world of loss and longing that I didn’t always know how to speak about aloud.

The first time I had seen Lee Krasner’s work, I was grieving a future that would never come. Newly divorced and in my mid-thirties, I didn’t know much about Krasner then; her legacy had been overshadowed by the infamy of Pollock. I’d traveled to New Orleans to stay in a friend’s empty loft for my first New Year’s Eve as a single woman. Looking for things to do, I decided to visit the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Pollock’s work was easily recognizable to me. When I entered the gallery space, I immediately knew it was his, but what was the piece next to it? I was drawn to the canvas of delicate pinks suspended between thick dark lines on a creamy background. Breath was its name. It was Krasner’s work.

The label on the wall next to Breath elaborated on Krasner as an artist:

Krasner’s paintings were often more subtle and introspective than her husband Jackson Pollock’s frenzied ‘action painting.’ Krasner was one of the only recognized female members of the core group of abstract expressionists of the 1950s, and her status as a ‘woman painter’ may have contributed to her lack of critical success during her lifetime. In 1949, when she and Pollock jointly participated in an exhibition entitled Artists: Man and Wife, one reviewer condescendingly claimed, ‘There is a tendency among some of these wives to tidy up their husband’s styles.’

The pair’s work hanging side by side struck me. There was much to scrutinize about their relationship. How did Krasner endure her husband’s bad behavior with women and booze? Did the energy she spent championing her husband’s work and legacy come at the cost of her own? Conflictingly, I’d read someplace that they saw each other as creative equals. Maybe both versions were true. Perhaps their mutual respect for each other as artists transcended Pollock’s notorious behavior and their interpersonal turmoil, at least for a while.

But it was also true that after Pollock was gone, Krasner entered the most prolific, acclaimed years of her life as an artist. Surely, her husband’s absence gave her the gift of single-mindedness.

In the absence of my former husband, I was able to be single-minded about what was next for me professionally, but my mind was preoccupied by something else. My future had opened up in a way I wasn’t prepared for. What did I want for myself now? My thoughts turned to family. My ex-husband and I had decided we wouldn’t have kids. Making art had been our focus. But now, I thought about the biology at work inside of my body. If I even think I want kids, I need to make a decision soon, I had written in my journal months after my marriage ended. That admission was exhilarating and terrifying.

Shortly after that, a mysterious package arrived in the mail. I ripped the slim cardboard sleeve open and pulled out an advance copy of Sheila Heti’s forthcoming book, Motherhood. When I read it that evening, it was as if Heti was speaking directly to me. I turned the pages until my eyelids were heavy and drooping. The next morning I rose early to finish it. Her words urged me to probe my innermost desires.

“Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself—it is the greatest secret I keep from myself,” Heti wrote, as if eavesdropping on my internal dialogue.

I had been dating someone new, and he wanted kids, although he’d never pressured me. A mutual friend introduced us a few months after my divorce. I promised myself I’d keep it casual, but a month became several months and now it was the end of the year, and I really liked him. It was not casual at all.

While I was in New Orleans for New Year’s, he was in South America on a motorcycle trip. To ring in the new year, he called me from a payphone in Ushuaia, Argentina. Excitement coursed through me at the sound of his voice on the other end. I couldn’t wait to reunite with him in New York soon.

After we said goodbye and hung up, I opened a bottle of champagne and poured a glass. Minutes before 2017 ended, I draped my coat over my shoulders and slipped onto the balcony to watch fireworks ascend over the Mississippi. Whiz! Pop! Bang! So much has changed in my life in the last year. Another round of color burst into the sky. The fireworks rose above the adjacent rooftop just enough for me to see exploding streaks of red, orange, gold, and violet. Then an eruption of cheering around me. Bottle rockets popped off. I raised my glass to myself.

The summer before I saw The Eye Is the First Circle at the Barbican, I had driven out to the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, New York, for a public tour of the farmhouse and barn studio where the artist couple worked. On the way from New York City to East Hampton, my mind raced. I thought about how I’d tried to protect myself from the possibility of pain by not letting others get close and minimizing what I wanted. I thought about Sheila Heti’s book. I thought about my boyfriend.

What if I waited too long? Will I regret not trying? I squinted and adjusted my visor to block the sun. I turned on my signal to pass a white sedan and glanced over my shoulder to check my blind spot. Maybe it’s instinct, hormones, biology. Or maybe it’s a purely emotional decision, but I can imagine myself with a family.

But I was also afraid. My mother died suddenly when I was ten. I’d grown up without the nurturing I’d taken for granted: Mom braiding my hair before school, baking cookies from scratch with me as her assistant, babying me when I was sick, instinctively anticipating what I needed. Was I capable of mothering another? Would I resent being a caregiver again after spending my preteen, adolescent, and early adult years caring for my widowed father and disabled brother? After my divorce, I’d felt free for the first time in my adult life.

I also thought about my work. I desired to be single-minded and have the opportunity to create like Krasner had done. I worried that motherhood would become an obstacle to my ambitions and diminish my ability to create. Could I be both artist and mother, or would I be made to choose?

Ruminating on my future, I passed the sedan and settled back into the right lane. After nearly three hours, I arrived at the farmhouse. A group of visitors was already gathered on the lawn. I could hear the group making small talk when I walked up: college students with their parents and a few couples. I assumed they were all here for Pollock.

The guide looked at his watch and motioned for us to follow him into the barn studio. He led us into the foyer where we swapped our shoes for soft-soled slippers to protect the hardwood floor. When I crossed the threshold, I lowered my gaze to the paint-covered planks of wood. Pollock’s fabled paint splatters were not here when Krasner worked in the barn, or at least they were not visible.

A few years before he died, Pollock had the wooden floor covered over with Masonite tile in an effort to winterize the barn. After that, his painting practice dwindled as his drinking worsened. Pollock had been drinking when he crashed his car in the front yard of their farmhouse and died with his lover—who survived—at his side. Krasner had gone to Europe only weeks before to get space from Pollock. In the aftermath of his death, she returned to a quiet farmhouse and empty barn studio.

I wiggled my toes in the squishy disposable slippers and felt the floorboards underneath. This was where Krasner began a new chapter. Here in the barn, unencumbered by the tight quarters of the farmhouse, her canvases expanded. My eyes traced stray paint gestures along the walls, outlining where her canvases formerly hung (Pollock only painted on the floor). I imagined Krasner’s arm outstretched, reaching for the uppermost corners of the draped cloth.

I had been reaching my entire life—toward leaving my hometown, toward creative work, toward forming my own identity apart from the family I was born into. I’d achieved those things, but, over the past year, I began to reach toward something else. Desire took shape in me like a painting emerging on a formerly empty canvas. I’d learned to see myself as an artist; now, a year after my first encounter with Krasner’s art, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see myself as a mother.

Months after my visit to the farmhouse, my boyfriend and I had been in North Carolina visiting his parents for Thanksgiving. We’d changed into our swimsuits and brought our drinks out to his parents’ hot tub. With little light pollution in the mountains, it was nearly pitch black. All I could see was what was in front of me illuminated by the glowing bulbs underneath the foamy water. Here I was in a hot tub with a man who loved me and wanted a family with me, if I wanted it, too. Nervous, I skimmed a hand along the top of the water.

“Um, I was thinking—what if I made an appointment to take out my IUD?” I said to my boyfriend, more as a statement than a question.

We started trying for a family that December. Five months later, on what would have been my mother’s fifty-eighth birthday, I held a positive pregnancy test. My boyfriend was on a work trip and I would wait to tell him in person. I balanced the test on the edge of the sink while I washed my hands. My cheeks were flushed. I patted them with my wet palms and turned sideways to examine my figure in the mirror, imagining swollen, tender breasts and a protruding abdomen I could cradle in my hands.

What I really wished for was to be able to share this secret with my mother, to call her on the phone and say, “I’m going to be a mother, too.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so excited! Whatever you need, I’ll be there,” I imagined Mom saying, because that’s the kind of mother she had been.

I hid the positive test in my boyfriend’s dresser drawer and let him discover it when he returned two days later.

“Is this for real?” he said, holding the plastic wand up to me, his eyes wide. He pulled me in for a long hug.

Weeks later, we flew to London for the summer for my boyfriend’s work. We boarded the plane to Heathrow with infectious optimism, but by the time we landed and checked into our temporary hotel, our hopes were quelled.

I stepped into the bathroom while my boyfriend browsed the room service menu. When I stood up from the toilet, something caught my eye: ruby droplets glistened on the tile near my feet. A sense of dread overcame me. I knew something was wrong.

In the morning, we took a cab to a doctor’s office where I lay on my back on the exam table, trying to get comfortable while the doctor squeezed jelly onto my abdomen and moved an ultrasound wand over it, searching.

Please, please let us see something.

“I’m sorry. It’s too early. All you can do is wait,” the doctor told us, unable to give a definitive answer.

For two weeks, I held out hope. Then one morning in late June I woke and felt a warmth, like wet paint spread over canvas, dripping with grief. The pregnancy was over.

At the end of August, I woke on the anniversary of Mom’s death with a strange feeling. Could I be pregnant? No, it can’t be. You’re imagining things. Embarrassed, I didn’t want to tell my boyfriend unless I knew for certain. After he left for work, I dressed and walked to the nearest pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test. Back at our rental, I sat on the toilet and held the stick underneath the stream, placed the cap back on, and set a timer for two minutes. Bee-eep! I examined the slender wand. Faint, but visible in the bright morning light: two pink lines.

Twelve days later, I sat on the bench at the Barbican, studying the monochromatic brushstrokes of The Eye Is the First Circle and wondering if my pregnancy would last. Holding the positive test in my hands on the anniversary of Mom’s death almost felt like a hug from her. Is it too good to be true? I stared at Krasner’s painting until the cream background faded and the brown circular lines began to overlap in my mind as questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what would happen, and neither had Krasner.

I imagined her in the barn studio in the dead of night, squinting under the cool-toned fluorescent bulbs. Pollock has been gone for over a year. It is silent, except maybe the slow chirping of crickets in a nearby field. There, muscle memory takes over. She reaches for her brushes and paints. Then she finds a way to return to herself on the canvas, scouring the depths of grief in the only way she knows how. The painting doesn’t hold answers, only questions. In the same way, I will use the medium I know—language—to return to myself in the coming months as I question a future that is growing in the dark, secretly forming inside of me.

Note: Lee Krasner’s work is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous. The show features over 120 works and is the first to examine the trajectory of the artist couple’s careers together. The show runs through January 31, 2027.

Tina Essmaker is a writer working on a memoir about losing her mother at age ten and caregiving for her father and disabled twin brother. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity Emerging Writer Essay Series and was a finalist for the 2023 Sewanee Review Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction Contest. She previously co-founded The Great Discontent magazine, coached creative professionals, and began her career as a social worker. Subscribe to her Empty Space newsletter on Substack. Instagram: @tinaessmaker.