Where Are You, Agnes? by Tessa McWatt

 Agnes and her elderly grandfather see a rainbow one day. When her grandfather asks her what her what she thinks, she tells him the rainbow is beautiful. He then covers her eyes and asks her, if it is still beautiful, to which Agnes replies that it is! She wonders if everyone thinks like this, and her grandfather tells her that he's not sure.

Agnes draws every day, whatever she sees, the birds, the sun, the "shapes she saw in the whet, in the tractor tires and the diamond-shaped lines on the backs of snakes." Agnes was so intent on her drawing that she often did not hear her mother when she called her. 

One day Agnes' grandfather moved their family from the farm to the city. She missed the birds, the snakes, the rows of wheat. Instead she saw bugs, and the patterns they made in the dirt. So Agnes began drawing insects. To her brothers and sister these seemed ugly but when she drew them, she felt the beauty of the rainbow returning. Again, Agnes was so intent on her drawing that she did not hear her mother when she called her.

One day she asked her grandfather who was much older now, why things must disappear. But he did not have an answer. Agnes missed the feeling the rainbow. She asked her grandfather how she could paint a real tree and he told her that although the tree will not last forever, she will see it in other places and it's beauty will be in her heart.

With the death of her grandfather, Agnes was deeply sad. She remembered what her grandfather had told her and discovered she could see beauty in many places, but most of all that beauty was in her mind, through the memories of what she'd seen.

Discussion

In Where Are You, Agnes?, Tessa McWatt attempts to portray the motivation behind Agnes Martin's artwork. Agnes was a 20th century abstract expressionist who was born and grew up in Canada but who spent most of her adult life in the United States.

Born in 1912, in rural Saskatchewan to Scottish Presbyterian parents, Agnes grew up in a home that was stern, her mother often using silence as a punishment. After spending time teaching in remote schools in the Pacific Northwest, Agnes moved to New York City in 1941. There she studied fine art at Teacher's College, Columbia University.

The next fifteen years were spent developing her painting skills by attending schools in New York and New Mexico. Eventually Agnes settled into a art community in lower Manhattan.  During this period, Agnes struggled with mental health issues. She eventually left New York in 1967 after winning a grant, and ended up in New Mexico.She lived a very minimalist lifestyle that likely would be attractive to some today, building her own home and studio on a mesa in Cuba, New Mexico. She stayed in the desert, painting her unusual art, that often led people to vandalize her paintings. Agnes eventually left her home and moved to a retirement home in Taos, New Mexico. She passed away in 2004.

McWatt adapts an anecdote from Agnes's life to portray the driving motivation behind Agnes Martin's  art. From her Author's Note in the back, McWatt writes, "Agnes once watched a young girl staring at a rose. She asked the girl if she thought the rose was beautiful, to which the girl said yes. Then Agnes took the rose and hid it behind her back. 'Is  it still beautiful?' she asked the girl.The girl agreed that it was, and Agnes told her that was because beauty exists in the mind."   McWatt believes this concept about beauty might have come from Agnes' grandfather with whom she spent a great deal of time while growing up. It is this abstract idea McWatt attempts to portray her picture book with Agnes questioning her grandfather as to how she can capture the beauty of an object like a rainbow or a tree if it isn't permanent. The answer as McWatt notes in her Author's Note, is that beauty doesn't lie within objects such as a rose, but that "Beauty is an awareness in the mind."  McWatt attempts to explain this concept to young readers with the unusual sentence,  "She ran home and painted this...and that...and everything, until she painted what was on the inside walls of her mind." Without the Author's Note at the back, I'm not sure most adults would understand what McWatt was attempting to convey in her story, but perhaps abstract expressionism is a difficult art form to comprehend.

Award-winning children's book illustrator, Zuzanna Celej has created soft, subdued illustrations for the story, using a palette of greys and sepia. The illustrations hint at the character of Agnes Martin's art, incorporating a similar palette, and grid lines while blending in prairie and urban scenes. Celej's illustrations were rendered in watercolour, collage and coloured pencils on paper. You can view some of Agnes Martin's work at Architectural Digest.

Book Details:

Where Are You, Agnes? by Tessa McWatt
Toronto: Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press    2020