Stories and embroideries

E-mail from my friend N., 23.3.2010
“This was the quote I took from the Arshile Gorky exhibition at the Tate Modern. From 1944

‘My mother told me many stories while I pressed my face into her long apron with my eyes closed. She had a long white apron like the one in the portrait and another embroidered one. Her stories and the embroidery on her apron got confused in my mind... All my life her stories and her embroidery keep unravelling pictures in my memory.’

They fled from Armenian Turkey to Russia during the pogroms of 1915 & his mother died there of starvation when he was still young.”

On the Tate Modern website, there is a short film of Gorky’s wife Agnes "Mougouch" Magruder talking about their life together. In his studio, she recalls, there was a daybed covered with a very prickly fabric, so prickly that she had to put something over it before she sat down because it pricked her legs that much. Among all my fabrics, I don’t have anything prickly enough to pair with this memory.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/arshilegorky/default.shtm