At 23, Theresa Kishkan met an artist who became obsessed with her. She was young, she was flattered, and the situation quickly overwhelmed her. He drew and painted her for a few months, after which she went away for a year. When she returned, she was determined not to resume the relationship.
But the artist made contact with her after the birth of her first child and became a family friend, bringing gifts of paintings. Those images hung in Theresa’s home, and one in particular reminded her almost daily of her younger self, in ways both positive and not so much. She avoided looking too closely at his images of her and at his long, passionate and often troubling letters.
Decades later, while sorting old correspondence, she was taken back to those early days and began, at last, to write about her relationship with the now-deceased artist. The Art of Looking Back is a meditation on the male gaze, on reclaiming one’s younger self, and on agency: how we lose it, how we find it again. This poetic memoir asks questions about older men and younger women and girls, and the persistence of that dynamic in art.
“The Art of Looking Back is a necessary, nuanced book for these polarized times. Oh, I understood this memoir with every molecule of my body—as will any older woman who was once a young woman spinning within an older man’s obsessive attentions. I devoured this unsettling book. Kishkan’s delicate, luminous style explores power and inadequacy, beauty and culpability with poetic attention.”—Evelyn Lau, author of Runaway and other titles
“The Art of Looking Back is a powerful, heartwrenching examination of discovering the complexity of power imbalances, sometimes long after the fact. An artist’s muse steps out from the frame that the artist created for her and into her own agency in this beautiful memoir exploring the ripple effects of the male gaze in the world of art.”—Kitty Stryker, author and consent educator
“Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back excavates art, memory, and the boundaries we cross—willingly or not. She recalls her late-1970s style—a faded jean jacket, flowers in her hair, a green hat, or was it red?—while confronting the lingering discomfort of being painted nude without consent by an older, married artist, Jack. She also encounters his even more unsettling depiction of his pre-adolescent daughter—a painting she later purchased and brought home. Each glance revives unease: why did she make it her own? Writing back to histories of domination, Kishkan joins muses and models like Fernande Olivier and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, reclaiming the gaze. Unflinching and vividly rendered, this memoir probes complicity and betrayal, showing art’s power to bear witness—and to expose the perpetrator—decades later.”—Irene Gammel, director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University
“Nuanced and poetic, The Art of Looking Back details the evolving understanding of a mature woman looking at the tapestry of feelings and experiences from her younger years, especially triggered by memories of a well-known older man’s obsessive enchantment with her as a flowering young woman through to her middle years.
Filled with rich reminiscences from earlier years and critical questions posed as an older woman, Theresa Kishkan’s poetic and vibrant writing grapples with youth’s evolving self-image, the reactions and decisions creating life’s trail, and the questions and insight that age can bestow.”—Christina Johnson-Dean, writer, teacher, and art historian
“This ground-breaking book examines concepts of shame and complicity and obsession and so it is, by turns, disturbing, heart-breaking, and infuriating. But most of all it is relentlessly honest and beautifully written.”—Caroline Woodward, author of Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper and other titles
“Theresa Kishkan travels an odyssey of her own memories and a lifetime of reflections to recover her younger self from an avaricious, obsessive older man and a society all too eager to judge or look away. By translating the passage of time and knowledge earned along the way into new memories, Kishkan brings the reader on her quest for reclamation. Have our cultural times changed enough to meet the author’s gaze?”—India Rael Young, curator of art and photography at the Royal British Columbia Museum
