Sara Baume: "I feel like my peers, especially women, are writing about family, relationships and motherhood... I wanted to create a different story about being in your late thirties and forties"

About four years ago, visual artist and writer Sara Baume arrived late to a group exhibition at a friend’s house in West Cork. It was 2021, just after a long COVID-induced hiatus from going out, and it seemed the world was getting reacquainted with itself – and with crowds. In a flurry of people – and a scene shrouded in anxiety at the looming pandemic fears – Baume found comfort in two paintings by an American painter who lived nearby but was not in attendance.

In a fit of curiosity and admiration, she found the artist, Mollie Douthit, on Instagram and they became friends.

That relationship is at the crux of Baume’s latest book, Opening Night, which explores the excitement of newfound friendship and how Douthit impacted Baume on a personal level and in her practice. As they became closer and started meeting up more frequently, the realisation slowly dawned that something special was at the helm.

“As the first line of Opening Night reveals, I met Mollie’s paintings before I met her, and then I looked her up,” Baume recalls. “As it turned out, she had read some of my books, possibly even all of them. She said she really loved my first novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither and that it was one of her favourite books. So we both built the friendship on our mutual admiration for each other’s work.”

Egg chair, Oil on canvas panel, 18x24cm, 2021

About six months into their friendship, Douthit asked Baume to write an essay for her solo exhibition at The Molesworth Gallery in Dublin.

“When I sat down to write, I thought about the time we had spent together and how we always had something to talk about despite working in different mediums,” she recalls. “My eyes lit up as I realised how much lovely personal detail I had about Mollie, whose work also pivots on personal detail. I couldn’t resist writing about her.

“At the time I met Mollie, I was actually writing about my grandmother, which I hope will someday become a longer project. I initially published a short essay in Granta Magazine called ‘Ray & Her Sisters’, which was about my grandmother and her two sisters. After I had written that, I thought there was more to the story and I started digging through my grandmother’s life. It was very overwhelming,” she laughs.

“In the midst of all this, I had made friends with Mollie, who was painting a portrait of her grandmother at the time,” Baume continues. “Her grandmother and grandfather owned this home on Pelican Lake in Minnesota, where Mollie went on holidays as a child. While the family eventually lost the house, it was a really special time in her life and in her memory. The painting was very much about that connection to her maternal grandmother, but also about the nature of memory. We bonded a lot over that. What I didn’t see coming at the time I wrote Mollie’s exhibition essay was that I wanted to write a whole book. ”

THE SHAPE OF LUNGS

Mollie Douthit was born in the U.S., where she attended college in her home state of North Dakota and studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After completing her post-graduate work at Burren College in Co. Clare, the budding oil painter eventually moved to Cork, where Baume also lives. Douthit’s paintings populate many of the pages of Opening Night.

“What drew me to her work was the smallness of the paintings that I initially saw in the exhibition,” explains Baume. “I’d always been drawn to miniatures. I suppose it’s a response to this culture that everything has to be loud and bombastic. When I was in art school, the tutors always told me to make my work larger. I’ve definitely rebelled against that in the years since, and I’ve come to prefer small and quiet things.

“So with Mollie, I was drawn to the scale of her paintings and the creepy, surreal aspect they have. For the most part, she seemed to paint rooms or outdoor spaces, but without people in them. It was like she was painting memories, but from her very unique point of view. The paintings are quite primitive in style.”

Bee sting naps, oil on panel, 24x30cm, 2021

One of the first canvases presented in the book depicts two single beds in a room, side-by-side with a lamp and its string between them. While neither Douthit nor Baume appear in the painting in human form, the message is abundantly clear. The lamp almost seems to be connecting the two beds, forming the shape of lungs breathing together. It’s one of many heartfelt expressions of Baume and Douthit’s friendship and their everyday lives in Opening Night.

“If there’s a narrative arc to the book, it’s about how Mollie started to paint her everyday reality and what was happening around her recent memories, rather than her distant childhood,” the writer explains. “Part of her reality was painting scenes from our friendship. She didn’t actually paint me – I think I only appear as a human form in one painting. But they all try to capture those scenes of our friendship.”

OUT OF MY BODY

Opening Night is a unique and significant work not just for its focus on platonic relationships, but for how Baume is able to encapsulate the experience of being a woman in your thirties within that context.

“I wrote the book when Mollie and I were in our late thirties,” Baume recalls. “I’m in my early forties now and I feel it’s an interesting age to make friends. For many, those friendships are already made.  I feel like my peers, especially women, are writing about family, relationships and motherhood, and I find all of these stories fascinating and enjoyable.

“With Opening Night, however, I wanted to create a different story about being in your late thirties and forties. It’s those stories about friendships at this age that are becoming more important to me over time.”

The story of Baume and Douthit’s friendship taught the writer several life lessons. As the book progresses, the painter begins to suffer from acute chronic pain. Baume looked after her friend and – in a beautiful display of true friendship – never left her side.

“Mollie was an American adrift,” she remarks. “When you’re not living in your home country, you need to rely more on other people, communities and friendships. They kind of become your family. So I felt Mollie needed me more acutely than other friends had. She made me see how I’d really let people down in the past or prioritised work over friendships. I would nearly always stay in and read rather than go out to see friends. Perhaps it’s the conditions of where I live – sometimes it’s hard to socialise with people here. In a way, Mollie forced me to step up as a friend, and made me realise that I hadn’t always done so.

“She also made me think about how I moved through the world. It’s because Mollie and I are very similar. So it’s like you’re watching yourself in your dealings with others, the way you navigate your career, your ambitions, your desire to be alone or not. Being around her was like I had floated out of my body and was observing someone interacting with the world who was very similar to me.

“Our lives have been reasonably different since I wrote the book. It’s funny, because she now lives in Malmö with her husband and has completely started from scratch to build a new life again. I can’t get over how tough that is. I’ve learned a lot from her. But I look back, and I feel that we were forces of good in each other’s lives”.

• Opening Night is on shelves now.