Memories of Miriam
Reminiscences from her son, Phil Boroff
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My earliest memories are of her painting in our little house in Silver Lake, a hilly, artsy suburb of Los Angeles. It was the 1950s and I was a child. The house reeked of oils; I didn’t like the smell, so I remember it. And she had that old, wooden, paint-smeared easel, which was well over six feet high. There was always something growing on it.
I remember her resolve and her exhaustion on some paintings, with which she would
sometimes wrestle for more than a week until she was satisfied. Sometimes, it would just take a day. I don’t know very much about her art teachers at that time (Joseph Chabot and Keith Finch) but I know they earned her respect. I’m a musician, and I’ve a feeling that, like in music, the art world has its own hidden conjurers. Old masters who can light up your life, if you dare knock on their door. My mother pounded on those doors.
Aside from her job as a fashion artist at Webb’s Department Store, Miriam would hold her own weekly art classes at our home for extra income. At them you could find people like Constantin Bakaleinikoff, who was a senior music director at RKO pictures - as well as Miriam’s longtime friend, Ann Del Monte, who was a housewife. You’d find renowned theater actors and factory workers and family there. I would have to stay quiet while they worked. For a while I would watch, and listen. Then I’d be sent to bed, under protest.
That old world is long gone. When I remember that type of crowd which so richly lined my life in those times, I am remembering ghosts. But now, nearly seventy years later, I live with my family in a house devoid of blank walls. To enter one of a hundred different beautiful worlds, my growing son had only to look up. Through her paintings, my mother and her world emanate into mine. I see my own reflection in her paintings. I believe - and hope - others will see theirs, as well.
As an older woman, my mom liked to tell a story about a field trip she took at age six to Boston's Museum of Fine Art. It was 1918. After touring the museum's halls for a bit, a few of her classmates gathered in a corner and started poking fun at a few paintings; LaTrec posters. Naturally, Miriam went over to get in on the fun, but she was struck silent by what she saw. Her friends moved on, not noticing that she had frozen - and they continued to scamper into the next room as she, staring at the paintings, had just started to weep. The school bus left the museum without her.
Miriam's young life was full of realities worth escaping. Born on September 9th, 1912, in Worcester, Massachusetts, she was the third child of Aaron Esselson, who was a carpenter, and Olga Litvak, who was a seamstress. Her parents had recently arrived in America after a long sea voyage from Rega, Lavia - which they had taken to escape the terrors of Tsarist Russia and the Pogroms.
Life in the Boroff household was stormy, steeped in passionate arguments between Miriam's parents and her two older brothers, David and George; arguments born mostly from living in poverty. In spite of that, Miriam would tell me her childhood felt rich. She was always good at creating a beautiful world for herself to contrast the harshness which surrounded her, and she became known in school for her constant daydreaming. Drawing was, at first, an avenue of escape, but it grew into something more.
Though Miriam received a scholarship at age seventeen to attend the School of Practical Art in Boston for a few years, her parents were left unimpressed; work was still hard to find. Her father, the carpenter, once told a census worker, "My youngest son George is a businessman, but Miriam just sits around the house drawing all day." Once, she tried drawing flowers on dinner plates for a china shop, but the fumes from the paint her employers provided left her nauseous and she had to quit.
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After a lot of hustling, however, she was hired as a fashion artist - before photographs took over, artists were taken on to illustrate trending garments for department store catalogues - and fashion served Miriam well. One night when she came home, after another jibe from her father about her profession, she pulled out her paycheck and showed it to him; it was three times what he made as a carpenter. The next day, much to Miriam's amusement, he had gone out to buy a set of paints.
During World War II, both her brothers enlisted. David, the eldest, saw some heavy combat in the Navy, but George quickly ascended to the rank of PFC - in his own words, “Personal Friend of the Colonel.” Miriam, however, joined the war effort by drawing up blueprints of warplanes for the Air Force. During a time that was hard on everyone, this kept her afloat - hopefully along with the planes - and it was on the factory floor where she first met and fell in love with George Boroff. They were married in 1945, in a double wedding with her brother David and his fiancé, Sally. I was born in 1947.
From what I could tell, my parents’ relationship had been very loving, in spite of tremendous volatility. It’s hard to remember, because they separated when I was so young. But I imagine it had to be similar to the Boston household Miriam grew up in; passionate, stormy. As it was, I grew up in 1950s and 60s suburban Los Angeles, spending the weekends with my father, who remarried within a few years, and the weekdays with my single mother. It was during this period that she was giving classes at our home in Silver Lake, and I was growing in the home of an artist.
She had to work straight jobs as well. After a few years of doing freelance fashion drawings, Miriam got a steady position at Webb’s Department Store in nearby Glendale. But when department store catalogues started switching to photographs to depict their fashions – and fashion artists started losing jobs left and right – my uncle George took Miriam on as a saleswoman at his drapery store.
This was a fine enough way to keep things working financially, but I think my mother eventually started to feel the artistic stagnation.
One night, late in my thirteenth year, I asked her why she looked so sad all the time. After a moment of surprise at my perception, she finally answered me.
“I feel like I’m going nowhere,” she said. “It’s my painting. I can feel the artistic freedom I wish I had floating further and further away. I'm not happy with my work, and I don’t know what to do.”
We both thought about it for a long time. Eventually, I spoke up.
“What if you tried something new? A new medium, maybe?”
The next day, she found Sueo.
Sueo Serisawa was a Japanese master of oils and watercolors, well-regarded in the Los Angeles modernist scene. During the war, he and his family had fled California to avoid being forced into internment camps, but in the early 1960s, by the time my mother needed him, he had returned to the west coast.
Respected though he was in the art world, money was hard to come by, and he turned to teaching watercolor painting to wealthy Beverly Hills matrons as a way to supplement his income. He knew they had no intention of dedicating their lives to the craft, and he was gentle with them. He was not gentle with Miriam.
One day, as he strolled around the studio, surveying his students as they painted, he stopped at Miriam. She was just putting the finishing touches on a still life with flowers.
“Oh Miriam, it’s lovely. It’s well-proportioned, pleasing to the eye, and if you brought it to any gallery, it would sell immediately.”
He then took a large rag, drenched it in dirty paint water, and hurled it onto the middle of her work with a wet slap. The murky water dripped down her still life, rendering it unrecognizable.
“See if you can do something with that.”
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Well, after a healthy moment of being incensed, Miriam returned to her painting and slowly made what she could out of the sopping mess. And whenever she told me this story, she’d always stop here and say, “That was the point.”
Eventually, if a certain object within her painting encroached into the space of another object, she didn’t panic. She wasn’t particularly worried anymore about keeping all the colors within the lines. If a color dripped into another area, she would improvise around it and make it belong. The world of the painting would naturally become a world separate from a photographic concept; a world that seemed to be melting together joyously. And so, with Sueo’s unorthodox help, she found her style in watercolors.
Years passed. By the time I was eighteen, I had become quite serious about the guitar, and so I had a daily practice regimen which drove our neighbors crazy. For that and various other reasons, it eventually came time for us to move. We began searching LA.
The place we found, the upper floor of a duplex in West Hollywood, was lovely. It had big windows and high ceilings; perfect for an artist. Mom said to me, “God, I hope the owner doesn’t mind your music,” so we went downstairs to the landlady’s place and knocked on the door. No answer. We knocked again, twice . . . finally, after a long wait, a tiny old lady wobbled out past the threshold.
“You’ll have to speak up, dear, I’m afraid my hearing’s just awful.”
“We'll take it,” I said.
That’s how Miriam Boroff, already in her late fifties, moved into the home that would be her studio for the next thirty years. Within three, I had moved out and started majoring in guitar performance at CalArts. She had already had her first bout with a serious illness by then - and escaped relatively unscathed - but I think it had woken her up to the value of her remaining time. She started working nonstop. Her routine was to get up and paint for hours, then go to bed. Often, she'd call me in the evening when she took a break, tell me how things were going. I was lucky to have a front seat to her creative process.
There was a Christmas art show every year, where she would sell a fair amount of her work. Other than this, though, she made almost no effort to promote herself.
She was past caring about recognition. She wasn't interested in constantly taking time away from her art to sell. She was done with compromise. Back then, I guess you could afford to have that mindset; perhaps the times were kinder to people with a purely artistic consciousness. Whatever the case, I think she had seen, both as a single mother and as a woman in a man’s playground, what it was to fight a system that would constantly work against her. So, with my having moved out, she decided to live for the art alone.
I’m still acquainted with some of her Christmas art show customers from over the years, and they’ve reached out more than once to tell me how much her work adds to their day. Sometimes they just walk down a hall, and a painting greets them. Sometimes it keeps them company during a solitary breakfast. But always, it adds something, and it adds something cumulatively, over days, over years, whereas otherwise there might just have been a blank wall.
She had a modest social life, mostly with people who became enamored of her through her paintings, and eventually, through her lithographs and etchings. Sometimes they would ask her, “How did you achieve this line? It’s so unusual! It's really solid, but it’s thick here, it’s thin there, it’d be impossible to do that with a pen.” My mother said, “I used a twig.”
And I think there were a lot of things like that, if you look at her brushes. There are a lot of things that just look like twigs or strangely-shaped something-or-others covered with ink. She’d use them because it would give her a curious line that she wanted. A line that was not smooth and perfect, but rather imperfect - and impossible to reproduce.
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As I said, she never remarried. It’s a cliché, but she really was married to her art. That's what she made time for.
Decades later, she'd sit with my four-year-old son, David. She’d guide his hand and say, “Now, paint a tree.” He’d start, and she’d say, “Slow down.” She’d take his hand, gently moving it across the paper. “The tree has to be growing as you paint it. The water on the brush is the rain that feeds it, and your eye is the sunlight that shapes it. It must always be actively living, reaching to the sky.”
In her art, to me, nature feels alive. More than that, this feeling of life is not just a pretty idea, but a direct translation of intention and movement into static being; so that something seemingly frozen in time carries eternity inside.
Even after that, when she lived in San Diego with me and my family in her late eighties - when her eyesight started to go and she was painting gradually less, and when the detail work became harder and harder for her - there was still a kind of fragile perfection. “Woman in Green Light,” one of her last works, is a favorite of mine. For some reason, it reminds me of her.
It’s just a woman holding some flowers. But she seems conjured out of pure white space, unperturbed that her right hand is a feathery splotch of yellow, or that she’s softly embraced by that green, liquid light. The painting dips into the surreal without losing its connection to you. It doesn’t have its tongue in its cheek to excuse its lack of realism. It’s just a woman, of our world, simultaneously obscured and revealed by - and imbued with - a strange magic of her own making.
Written by David Morales Boroff in 2019, based on conversations with his father, Philip Boroff.
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