A treatise on saying goodbye: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the materiality of love

Our emotions feel uniquely ours. But they're not. Situations and circumstances are unique, emotions are not. For an artist – and it doesn't matter whether we work in paint, stone, or words – I have come to believe that the primary task is to feel deeply. First on behalf of ourselves, and then everybody else. And to find a language to convey those feelings to the point where someone who sees or hears the work is forced to stop in their tracks and think, "This is it. This is me. How can someone else be feeling the exact same thing?" And that way their situation might not seem quite so hopeless, or they might feel a little less alone.

This is a realisation that came after I finished reading the final chapter of Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010), my eyes swollen and tears streaming down my face. I knew it would be an emotional ride from the onset to be transported to the life, and death, of a man whose work and unapologetic fearlessness I have long admired. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the emotional impact it would have on me. Just Kids, besides a poignant memoir on Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s formative years as artists, as lovers and lifelong friends in late 1960s, 70s, and 80s New York, is a poetic treatise on saying goodbye. A lesson in letting go of a loved one with dignity and grace.

As he wrestled with and explored his homosexuality through his work, Mapplethorpe would become one of the most influential photographers of his generation who would elevate the medium of photography, besides being a means for documentation, into a fine art form in its own right. Turning his struggles into his strength, he became his work, and his work became him, sometimes delicate and fragile, other times confrontational and raw, but always sincere and beautiful. Always Smith walked beside him, on her own path, one that would lead her to introduce her poetry into rock music and become one of the most influential musician-writers of our time.

As the threads of their lives intertwined and disentangled, they never came undone. At times he seemed there, and hers, and at other times he ventured into places she knew she could not follow. Small goodbyes took place throughout their lives where they had to make space for their work and others, until the final big one in March 1989 when Mapplethorpe passed from the complications of AIDS. However, the red thread throughout their story is the lasting deep devotion they shared for each other and their work, a love that was fully accepting and completely unconditional. Without the need to define it, they knew it was a love that would transform them both. And it did.

My tears after reading the final paragraph are a testament to Smith’s ability to love without restraint and to convey this through her poetic way of writing. I came to realise that for artists skill and mastery of technique are of course a necessary prerequisite, but what they’re holding in their hands is emotion. Love. That's the raw material they're really working with. There are no shortcuts, though. In order to mould this delicate matter correctly, they must truly feel it. They must feel it all. It has to be real. Others can’t feel it in the work if the artist doesn’t feel it first. Smith felt it, and I felt it with her. Smith loved Mapplethorpe, and, through her, so did I. I grieved for Robert Mapplethorpe. For the artist. For the man. For Smith losing him. For loved ones I lost and others I have yet to lose.

I don't believe in creative blocks. The problem is not in creativity. It is in feeling. In the inability, for whatever reason, to allow ourselves to feel what we need to feel. We close ourselves off to it, because it may hurt too much. And when we don't feel, we don't create. And then, of course, when we don't create, we feel equally miserable and empty. I believe that's the real struggle of the artist. The need and necessity to feel, so profoundly to the point where emotion inevitably bursts from the confined space of the body, and it has nowhere else to go but into a different container – a drawing, a sculpture, a piece of music – an external carrier where everything that makes us so painfully human re-materialises for all to see. Artists have to be strong enough to withstand their own emotions for prolonged periods of time, and possess the strength to realise, as Mapplethorpe did, and Smith did, that the ability to be vulnerable by exposing them and entrusting them to others is, in truth, an act of courage.

As I’m reassembling my easel in my new work space, I remember a magazine cut-out print I unearthed from a moving box a couple of months ago of Mapplethorpe's 1984 White Gauze photograph announcing the posthumous 50 Americans exhibition of a selection of his photographs at Sean Kelly, New York, in 2011. It shows two lovers embracing, wrapped together in white bandages. The lovers are unable to see each other, yet the wrapping is sheer enough for the viewer to see that one of them, facing the camera, has an opened mouth as if in mid-scream or gasping for air from the heat of the other’s passionate kiss. Yet there’s an unmovable stillness to the image, a moment of trust and tenderness frozen in time. It is the first image to adorn my new studio wall to remind me that powerful art, like love, is intuitive, non-judgmental, fragile, and fearless.

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My drawing White Gauze is based on this photograph, the vision Smith describes of Mapplethorpe on the beach just before the blue hour after his passing, and the opening lines of her song “Paths that Cross” from the album Dream of Life (1988):

I feel a needing

To bridge the clouds

Softly go

A way I wish to know, to know

It is symbolic of the lasting bond between two people who love each other that even in death remains unbroken.