Growing up in the 1950s, Jane Orleman lived in a shadow world, light years from the all-American television homes of “Father Knows Best” and “Make Room For Daddy,” with their charming, benevolent patriarchs.
In the house where she lived, Jane was raped or beaten by relatives and family friends nearly every day from the time she was eight years old until she was twelve. “When I was a child, I thought I was a bad person,” Orleman says. “Now I know that I just had a bad secret.”
She kept the secret, and when she began painting twenty years ago, Orleman filled her canvasses with powerful, radiant goddesses. “A lot of the goddess imagery was very sexual. I think it was my way of transforming the physical experience of what had happened to me,” says Orleman. From her home in Ellensburg, Washington where she lives with her husband, artist Dick Elliott, Orleman worked steadily throughout the 1970s and 1980s, creating twenty paintings a year.
Then began her gradual, inexplicable slide into a torporous state in which she all but stopped painting by 1989. “It was as though all of my vital energy and interest in life was draining from me. I filled the void with endless games of solitaire and science fiction,” Orleman says of that period. With her mother’s death in 1989, Orleman felt oddly released. But still unable to paint, she entered therapy in 1990.
Orleman found her childhood so difficult to speak about to her therapist that at times she could literally only whisper. But often using small canvasses (“like a child,” says Orleman), she began to paint again. Working in oils — first with a paintbrush, then a palette knife, and finally a butcher knife — Orleman painted the underground river of images as they surfaced in her therapy and dream life. In two years, Orleman has completed nearly two hundred paintings.
The shock waves and panic of sexual violence roll off many of the canvasses in a palpable surge. In others, we see the aftermath of assault: the child’s guilt, her masking of emotions. In nearly every one, we witness Orleman’s rediscovery of feeling and memory, sometimes a slow unfolding as she peels away layers of herself, other times a radical awakening.
After years of creating kaleidoscopic goddess-women, the forty-nine-year-old Orleman is now transferring to canvas something more fantastic, more mysterious, more reverent. It is a bold and very human endeavor, made braver by the openness of her quest.
— Cassandra Sitterly
The paintings from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.
A Death-Defying Act
“If I hold myself tight and ignore the deadly sexual memories, they may choke me, but I defy their power to kill me. It is an act of will to ignore the past; it takes all of my attention and energy to shut out this force that has me by the throat. I have had many dreams of being choked by a rapist, which of course I was. That was forty years ago when I was a child. I am still holding my breath.”
Memories Of Mother
Across a psychic landscape filled with powerful images of her father, brothers, and other males, Orleman’s mother drifts randomly, ghost-like and unresponsive past rooms haunted by violence and rape. “When I was thirty-five, my parents moved to the town which had become my home. Until then, I had kept 3,000 miles between us. As a child, I had begged my mother to stay. As an adult, I begged her to leave. I don’t know which was more painful.”
Me, Myself And I
A profound aspect of Orleman’s journey has been her confrontation with “the self I present to the world,” the unauthentic representation of herself constructed and maintained for years to cover the reality of her violent childhood. Now the walls are tumbling down. “The inner me is desperate to kill off this false front,” says Orleman. “But there is a third self who wishes to reach an accommodation between them.”
Ever After
A recurring image in Orleman’s work is the devouring beast that she sees as her shadow side, the unmanageable fears and conflicts that threaten to overtake and destroy her. “I could spend eternity running from myself,” she says. She painted “Ever After” while preparing to present her art to a group of forty sex offenders. “I had decided to quit running and face my fears.”
Some Weird Kind Of Channeling
“My therapist and I had been congratulating one another on how much work we had done, on how well things were moving along. He said, ‘And someday, maybe you will know what you are going to paint before you paint it, instead of this weird kind of channeling that you do.’ I nodded my head in agreement at the time, but the next morning I woke up in alarm. Weird kind of channeling! Oh my God, that was the one thing I was confident that I was doing right! I was really upset. But I worked through the conflict and realized I was doing it exactly right. Therapists don’t know everything. That’s OK too.”
Daddy’s Home And Boy Are You Going To Get It Now
In “Daddy’s Home,” Orleman works on a small canvas to provide the child’s perspective of her father’s looming, threatening figure. “My dad was very big and heavy,” Orleman says. “This image doesn’t do justice to his actual size. I often thought of him as 300 pounds of raging bull, coming across the room at me with his arms flailing.”
Beyond All Reason
“In questioning the experience of rape, I found it beyond all reason.”
Dream Quest
“I seem to be painting and dreaming my way through therapy,” Orleman says. “All the old feelings make their way out, one way or the other. In some dreams I am the helpless victim of rapists; in others, I am the heroine swimming boldly upstream to confront the guardian of the source.”
Exhibits of Orleman’s paintings may be arranged by contacting Jim Rosengren, Exhibit Touring Service, 1-800-356-1256.
