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The Artist Date

Finding my Muse as NorthPark Mall

Elaine Gantz Wright

Aug 5

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I have not been on an Artist Date since about 1995 when I dove into Julia Cameron’s transformative self-help book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Creativity. It was “a spiritual journey of creative recovery” to help self-defeating artists get out of their own way and build the self-confidence to create. It was very “how-to” with lots of self-assessment exercises and a daily journaling practice called Morning Pages. I loved it. That’s not unusual. I tend to embrace fancy, new concepts like Velcro, but the execution often gets stuck. In this case, some things just take time, as I am finally scratching my writing itch after 30 years of telling other people’s stories.

So, here I am, taking an online “summer school” writing workshop with one of my favorite writers of all time, Anne Lamott. She was one of my first memoir-writing idols. Her rapier wit and articulate heart have helped me laugh through life’s most torrential tears. My late friend Carol Crittenden, who died suddenly about a year ago, shared my love for Anne Lamott. We devoured every book she wrote, plus we saw her speak at Arts & Letters Live in Dallas. We even shook her hand. Carol and Anne have been prominent threads in my life’s well-worn ruana.

Speaking of accessories, back to my artist date. As part of our homework, we were instructed to take ourselves to a place outside of our regular routines. For some reason, I thought of NorthPark Mall in Dallas. I suspect it was a wink from my mom with endorsements from Carol and Elliot.

Present and Past

I walked in the Neiman-Marcus side door at 2:30 pm on a Friday.

The NorthPark lot was packed. Where did all these people come from? As my ex-husband, Max, used to opine, “Don’t these people have homes?” Or jobs? The world is such a befuddling place. We have “summer Fridays” at my current employer, a healthcare software firm, which means we can leave at noon if “all our work is done.” Still, I had a pinch of that “naughty-girl/playing hooky” feeling. When will I ever shed that?

I had not been here in years to shop. Maybe for a film or restaurant visit here and there. But it had been a major destination in my formative years. When I recalled Ray Nasher’s spectacular world-renowned art collection housed there, it seemed like the perfect choice. However, I knew the place’s vibe had shifted dramatically over the past six decades, evolving from Woolworth’s and Penney’s to Gucci and Prada. The brand pedigree far exceeded mine.

As one of the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping centers in the nation, NorthPark Mall opened in August 1965 in a then-adolescent Dallas, where the trappings of success were essential. I had arrived four years earlier, also in August. From day one, it was one of my dazzling artist-mother’s favorite destinations.

She elevated shopping to an art, and NorthPark was her retail Metropolitan Museum. I remember shopping all day at stores like Young Ages, Casual Corner, and Lord & Taylor, lunching on broth, popovers, and strawberry butter at Neiman’s Mermaid Café. Saturday shopping was my mom’s favorite recreational activity and one of the only times she spent alone with my sister and me. That might be why NorthPark holds the same kind of nostalgia others feel about home.

Yes, there was a time when I loved getting lost in a day of shopping, but it doesn’t hold the same appeal today. Maybe it’s my age, COVID, the proliferation of online options, or anxiety associated with grief, but I have lost my shopping muscle memory. This is a way I have radically changed since Elliot’s death in August 2018.

I was a new version of myself.

I continued to occupy a kind of liminal space between the before and the after. The in-between. It’s hard to believe that I was the same girl who bounced from Titche’s (which became Joske’s, then Dillard’s), to JCPenney’s, to the Melody Shop, to Spencer Gifts, and then to Orange Julius for a frothy citrus whip.

Getting Acquainted

I wandered past the sparsely filled designer racks and checked a price tag on a sleeveless purple floral shift dress – $1,525. Yowzah! I kept walking. Riding the escalator down, the flashes of memory were almost blinding as I descended into a sea of glass cases filled with precisely placed shiny objects. From tiny handbags to jewel-encrusted necklaces, it all felt like an anachronism—a vestige of another time and era— complete with salespeople wearing their bemused ennui like designer masks, as they scanned the meandering crowds for signs of interest.

Alas, the Elizabeth Arden makeup counter was long gone, replaced with elite brands and concoctions I didn’t even recognize. That was always the first stop, where my mom would banter with Mercedes, her favorite “clerk,” as she called her back then. Mercedes had jet-black hair swooped up in a tall French twist, red-orange lips, and hammered-silver earrings that dangled from her lobes like Christmas tree ornaments. This was my mom’s Saturday ritual.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Cushing (that was her painting name), I have your lipsticks ready,” Mercedes said. “And I would love to come to one of your art classes sometime.”

“Absolutely, would love to have you. How about the Tuesday afternoon class?” my mom offered. Melissa and I sprayed each other with cologne.

“I will see if I can get off. Thank you,” she said, packaging up three “Fuchsia Shock” lipsticks my mother purchased.

Eventually, my mom met her husband, Spider, who offered to teach her Spanish. They all had dinner and drinks often, sometimes with my father, but he preferred to work on his projects in the garage.

Though I set out on my date for the Nasher art collection, the memories were overwhelming me, ambushing my attention with every step. I was ripe for them though, as since Elliot died, I have been a spiritual antenna, poised to receive every sign, synchronicity, and wink.

I felt like I existed in a different dimension or on some parallel plane.

The Main Event

Just then, I turned, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Two Cups snagged my eye, nestling in the large urn of perfectly pruned greenery. The bright, hyper-cartoon-style highlighted the often-subtle role of negative space in a not-so-subtle way. It was all about the presence of the absent. How profound and appropriate.

Plus, on some level, Lichtenstein’s whimsical work was a metaphor for the whole mall. It was the juxtaposition of the crowded river of humans flowing past the all-but-empty luxury stores. Couture, too haute to touch. An interesting paradox. Strange to see the chicly clad salespeople wandering around aimlessly in their carefully curated containers, many just checking their phones. Ah, the brave new world.

I thought of all the stories that the pristine cream brick walls and the perfectly manicured planters could tell. Then, I arrived at the iconic center fountain next to Dillard’s, but much to my chagrin, found only a tattered handmade sign that read, “Closed for Repair.” The faded, blue-tiled basin was dusty and dry. No sparkling multicolored lights shimmered under the translucent surface. No towers of wet, white astonishment rose and fell like dancing pylons that would rival the Bellagio.

Moving on around the corner, my senses shifted to wafting scents and aromas—like pungent sachets strung on the necklace of time. I sniffed, savored, and sneezed on the sensory journey. Fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies; earthy waves of patchouli tinged with vanilla; a cloying floral haze of rose and gardenia; something like tuna salad and dill pickles; woodsy, tobacco-laced leather, the kind you have to be slightly wicked to wear; the ripe, not-so-appealing odor of worn, wet socks after a soccer game, and at the end, the appetizing cloud of garlic at Eataly. I had never been, but I decided to investigate the bustling Euro-marketplace.

I sipped a cold, fresh lemonade as more pre-Prada memories streamed back, like the sewing classes I took in 1974 at the Singer sewing machine store, complete with a fashion show in the middle of the mall. I clearly remember walking the runway Emade of folding tables in my sleeveless red shirtdress with fake gold buttons. My mother never sewed a stitch, but she was happy I did. She said with a chuckle, “If I learn how to sew, someone might expect me to do it.” She said the same thing about typing.

Now and Next

After the next turn, I came to a looming red steel sculpture in one of the larger spaces at the new end of the mall. I could almost see Elliot in his pressed purple shirt playing Feliz Navidad with his Booker T. Washington High School combo. There was a pianist in space that day, and his rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon filled me to overflowing. The grief moment seized me like a tidal wave, and I could not contain the tears. Pain and joy together. I sat quietly and let them flow. Though my artistic path has been circuitous, I had given birth to two brilliant artists, “Leonardo da Vincis.” Ian’s work was alive and evolving in computer gaming and visual art, and Elliot’s would live on in the gorgeous memories and scattered glimpses we will continue to cherish.

I’d never experienced NorthPark like this. I thought of how different shopping was with my boys, too—in and out, like surgical strikes, and no interest in wandering or meandering. H&M and J. Crew on sale. That was it. They embraced their dad’s name for NorthPark: “Kraphtron,” NorthPark spelled backwards. He was not a fan.

I had come full circle.

Indeed, there was so much magnificent art, but it was the metaphorical “negative space” that made all the impact—noticing what was uniquely mine to see, experience, and feel between the lines. This date was less about art and more about the mosaic of memories that defined my muse. It was a date I didn’t expect, in a place I had known for years, but that day, came to “know for the very first time.”

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, 1943