The Lake Home
Sara Baume | Tolka Issue Six, July 2024
Mollie leaned over the kitchen sink and picked up a little glass bottle from the windowsill. She measured three drops into the plastic cap and showed me – it was viscous, dark brown – then she added a splash of water from the cold tap, and swirled, and held it out again so that I could see how the substance had turned – in a fraction of a second, in a spontaneous display of alchemy – so pale and cloudy that it resembled weak, milky tea. Then she knocked it down her throat like a shot, twisted her face in disgust and listed the names of the supplements she was taking to sustain her immune system. The sun was high above Mollie’s cabin. Light reached in the kitchen window and across the sink, fingered the rug in front of the log stove and stopped. It was a peculiarly hot afternoon in May – the patch of sloping lawn outside the door was flecked with daisies. Further below I could see a billowing polytunnel and a stretch of meadow grass, and white bedsheets hanging on the washing line, glowing. But in the cabin it was shady and cool. Mollie spooned powdered Barleycup into two mugs and as the kettle boiled she told me what it contained – roasted grains and chicory root – because I had never tasted it before. All year, I had been visiting Mollie’s paintings, the ones she called the lake home series. She would put them out for me, propped up against the wall and the legs of the workbench and the door of the fridge, lined up along the hard, narrow sofa, crowding her cramped living space. I always brought the dogs with me and I would grit my teeth as they snuffled around the canvasses and wagged their tails into the partially dried paint. I would try to shoo them away, but Mollie never seemed to mind. Nothing a little linseed can’t fix, she would call out from the kitchen on the other side of the rug. The smell of scented candles, and of food, always filled the cabin – sandalwood, bergamot, fresh bread, toasted seeds, carrot soup with orange in it – and I often wondered if the paintings would look different without the attendant smells. I couldn’t believe that Mollie had no protective feelings toward her work; it seemed rather that she was open to the influence of external forces, accepting of whatever it was that luck had in store. I would be apologetic, but secretly I liked the idea that a strand of hair would adhere itself to the surface of a canvas, leaving a surreptitious signature for a conservator of the future to peel off and ask herself: who was this dog? I had a tendency to search the surfaces of artworks for flaws; I found it exhilarating to locate a drip of coffee – it seemed to me as much a piece of biography as the painting itself.
We carried our mugs across the cabin and sat down on the carpet in front of the lake home series. Mollie broke a bar of dark pistachio-nut chocolate into shards inside its paper and I set the dictaphone app on my phone to record, placed it on the floor beside the chocolate, and then sampled the Barleycup – it tasted like hot, liquid bread. I always looked forward to meeting the paintings again – the one with the bat in the shower, the one with the big blue bed, the one with the tree that crawled with army worms, the one with two puppets hanging from their strings in a dark wardrobe, the one with a red staircase and an amorphous patch of black that intrigued me – a section that appeared to have been painted out and never painted over, to represent an absence and a presence simultaneously. The lake home had belonged to Mollie’s grandparents and was where she, along with her parents and younger sister, had spent summers as a child in the 1980s and ’90s. Her grandparents had bought it in the 1960s from a paraplegic Korean man, and so the house and garden had been designed to accommodate a wheelchair – the halls were wide, there was an abundance of bridges, the front pathway was a gently sloping zig-zag – and the design was distinctly influenced by East Asian culture – there was a rock garden, paper screen walls, and an extraordinary amount of red paint. Because Mollie had not yet made a painting of the façade, all year I had been trying to piece the house beside the lake in Minnesota together in my mind. The painting that came closest to an exterior view was mostly taken up by the olive-green carpet of a living room. It contained several well-spaced objects – an old-fashioned television set with rabbit-ears aerial, a tall lamp with a pleated shade, an inlaid coffee table and a bear skin mounted high above the sofa, legs splayed. A ladder led up to a mezzanine, where there were two single beds, a rug and a small, rectangular window that enclosed a patch of night sky, swimming with stars, a thumbnail Van Gogh. The downstairs windows were dark too, the wood-panelled walls sloped away from the carpet in every direction, and suddenly there were roof slates and the branches of a tree and an azure sky as if the room had been cracked open. It was night, I assumed, inside the lake house in Mollie’s head, or night was its dominant feeling – safety, cosiness, portent – whereas outside it was always day, perhaps the sunny summer one upon which she arrived with her family each year, the lake shimmering into view between the trees through the car window. The first time I saw this painting, before I really looked, I took it to be a version of the cabin – the timber walls and ladder and mezzanine, the colours – and every time since I have continued to find it pleasingly confusing; the collision of past and present, of Minnesota and West Cork. It makes me wonder if, by becoming so attached to a place as a child, Mollie was unconsciously sentencing herself to seek it out again, later in life – had she moved all the way over here only to travel back in time?
Guest cabin, by Mollie Douthit, 2023, Oil on linen panel
In the months that I’d been visiting, the paintings of the lake home series had been changing, enigmatically. In the one with the yellow-headed bird, a vine of flowers had twined itself around the black railing – cat’s ear, or lesser hawksbit, or dandelion – and an orb-shaped cloud had popped up in the sky. Mollie told me how, after she had painted the cloud, she had seen a white orb in her mind during a psychic meditation, hovering, bursting with light. She had a complex relationship with what she termed ‘woo woo’ – as far as I could tell she was occasionally persuaded, and constantly bemused. She would try things out – psychics, healers, homeopaths – while simultaneously laughing at herself and her pursuit of eudemonia and transcendence. Even though I loved to hear her accounts of these sessions, I sensed it was only in my company that she joked, because I give the appearance of having no use for woo woo and she was instinctively cautious of being judged. I live a flatter life than Mollie; I experience less strong emotions, and this is a state I’m generally grateful for as well as, perhaps, the reason why I find her so fascinating. There were two new paintings positioned at a slight distance from the others – the first resembled the vertical view of a landscape, a satellite image. Here is the coastline, I guessed, tracing the tip of my finger through the air in front of the canvas, and a beach, and then the green and brown land. But no, the sea was a pond, she told me, the beach was a sandbox, the land was the deck of the lake home. The deck was red, she said, but it’s brown, I said, and then Mollie explained grounds to me, how she builds colour in coats on the canvas as well as by mixing them on the palette. It influences the shade on top, she said, most of the paintings are yellow beneath the surface, or mossy green, and if there’s any kind of gap it stops the stark white from peeking through. The red of the deck would be richer – righter – because there was brown beneath it. Looking at the just-begun painting I was struck by the bathos of sandboxes in suburban gardens, by the melancholy act of filling a little pit in a concrete yard with store-bought sand, clean as sugar, and handing a child a plastic spade and a castle-shaped bucket in order to simulate the experience of the tremendous, gorgeous, dangerous ocean. I asked Mollie if there was a shift between what the paintings looked like in her mind before she started work, and what they looked like in the real world, on the canvas, and she barked out a despairing laugh. Trying to align those two things is what the whole of painting boils down to, she said. It is the same trouble with sentences – I always know what I want to say but fashioning it into a string of words that I can type out with my fingers and see with my eyes – that is where the work of writing lies, the torture and the rapture.
Non breeding females, by Mollie Douthit, 2023, Oil on linen panel
The second of the new paintings depicted what looked like the inside of a dimly lit garden shed. On one side there was the edge of a frame and a slice of a pane of glass – it had a menacing atmosphere which would, I thought, have been lost if Mollie had chosen to paint the entirety of the window. I never think about composition, she whispered, things turn up in certain places of their own volition – before she even lifts a brush the paintings have already been abandoned to a certain degree of, again, luck, only this time it is the luck of internal forces. What is excluded is as important as what is included, and every painting is haunted by this process.That’s why I like visiting them, I said, seeing what has materialised or dematerialised, picturing what they might finally become. Do you like the idea of what they might be better than what they are? Mollie asked, her tone somehow both anxious and provocative. NO, I yelped, I always trust what’s there – your painted universe. I had thought that this was the answer she wanted, but instead she seemed crestfallen and started to talk about Hitchcock – how much she admired his films and how little they are about him; how he had managed to generate this distance and yet still persuade so many people to appreciate his work. In the painting of the big blue bed she had included two of Alfred Hitchcock’s dogs, one on each side – a white Sealyham terrier called Mr Jenkins and a black cocker spaniel called Edward IX. If my paintings are too personal, Mollie said, I’m afraid they won’t let other people in.
In good fun, by Mollie Douthit, 2023, Oil on linen panel
Elvis might have slept here, by Mollie Douthit, 2023, Oil on linen panel
My favourite painting in the lake home series is of an oval of lawn with pale tracks running all the way round. On one side of the lawn there’s a tree with the roots exposed, a long, branchless trunk, a bulbous crown, and on the other side there’s a huge, grey dog and its shadow. Features at the top and bottom of the canvas – stone paving, red railings – have been cropped from view. The dog is mythological in appearance, a version of Cúchulainn’s wolfhound; in fact, it is a deerhound that Mollie knows personally. It belongs to the Ballydehob tree surgeon and wandered into the cabin one morning while his master was nearby, assessing an unwieldy copse. The first time I saw the painting I had commented in a throwaway manner that the snout was too short for a deerhound; Mollie did not reply but later the same week she sent me a photograph of the painted dog with a somewhat altered, longer snout, and I was moved. I find the paintings of the lake home series bizarre, and yet at the same time I always feel as if I am inside them, sifting through my own memory bank, clutching at familiarities. The painting of the oval lawn transports me to Iowa City, where I spent three months on a writing residency in 2015, having never been anywhere in America before, other than New York. The Midwest was a revelation to me. Without any dogs to walk, first thing every morning I would get up and run – I have never been able to train myself to slow down and jog; I always sprint and quickly tire – around a nearby park that seemed colossal: the established trees and a sprawling network of tracks and a fat river that sawed a straight line. I was stunned by the quantity of open space and sky; it gave me a piercing understanding of the vastness of the continent; it made me realise that I live on a pokey island adjacent to a continent cluttered with pokey countries. What, I wondered, did America feel like for Americans – was its largeness perceptible; did the amount of sky seem ordinary? Though there is nothing specific about the lawn in Mollie’s painting that makes it resemble the park in Iowa City, still I could not see it without remembering my mornings there, running laps so that I did not get lost, the desolation of being so small in such a large place.
Anniversary hound, by Mollie Douthit, 2023, Oil on linen panel
Later on in the week, alone at my desk, I searched the internet for ‘propolis’, the only name I was able to remember of the supplements that Mollie had listed as she stood by her sink. It is, I discovered, a sticky matter harvested by bees from the buds of cone-bearing trees; the workers use it like glue to help build their hives, literally licking it onto the walls of the sheltering structure. It possesses all kinds of magical properties, healing skin and fighting bacteria, but for certain people it also carries ‘the risk of bleeding’, whatever that means, as if bleeding is not usually risky. I switched off the internet and started to play back the audio that I’d recorded in the cabin and realised at once that it had been a mistake to position the phone alongside the chocolate wrapper – our conversation was periodically interrupted by the vociferous rustling of paper. I was surprised by the strength of Mollie’s accent; to my naked ear she did not sound so American, and I was surprised again, and vaguely concerned, that I also sounded American – sometimes it would take a few seconds before I was able to identify whose voice was whose. I have a very soft lisp – sustained from breaking my jaw in a bike accident in my twenties – that suddenly sounded monstrous. Mollie and I paused to sip our Barleycups and nibble on the chocolate as we talked; we intermittently hooted with laughter. As I listened, alone at my desk, I was suddenly ambushed by the awful and specific fear that none of it was of any consequence, actually – the practices to which we separately, assiduously devoted our days; the things she painted, the things I wrote, our repetitive, sheltered, privileged lives – then a strimmer kicked off in the background, the racket of a spinning line savaging the meadow grass, shooting out severed flower heads, and our voices were chewed up by the noise.
Sara Baume is the author of four books, the most recent of which, Seven Steeples, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2023 she was named one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’.
Mollie Douthit is a Cork-based oil painter. Recent exhibitions include When Worlds Colide, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; Dream are important, Molesworth Gallery; Tyranny of Ambition, Highlanes Gallery; Cover Versions, RHA; Save the best part, BernBaums, Fargo, North Dakota; and Generation 22, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.
‘The Lake Home’ was first published in Issue Six of Tolka (November 2023). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
