The first of the newly recovered works, the portrait of Naomi’s pet rabbit ‘Sid’ [1], found its way into Ms Demaio’s home as did the more-revealing portrait of the teacher [2], signed with a verse thanking the teacher for the lending of a book and for her help with summer art workshops. These drawings, resident on Ms Demaio’s walls as they were, would have escaped Ivesmail’s curatorial inspection. They also pre-date anything in the central collection as both drawings were completed when the artist was in her seventh school year (all drawings in the central collection were executed during her eighth). The portrait of the art teacher itself is a dazzling rendering of a gloriously aged and craggy face, redolent of the later portraits of the artist’s grandparents (and also Ivesmail nemeses) in Extraneous Drawings #66-67.
The relationship between artist and teacher is cast in a new light throughout the Nash works. The removed School Sketchbook pages hosting, respectively, the horse [6] and the tulip [7] show the more supportive nature of Ms Demaio’s “callous red ink”. This benevolence is furthered by the teacher’s entry on the removed page of School Sketchbook Four, home to a meticulous description of a dog’s paw [16] that offers Ms Demaio’s sorrows for “Naomi’s loss” and tenders the teacher’s ear should it be necessary.
Ms Demaio’s compassion for the young artist is most visible on the envelope that Ivesmail prised from the seventh School Sketchbook [19]. Following a lengthy profession of Naomi’s feelings, the teacher suggests a meeting to talk over “some of these things in person.” This is the meeting that Ivesmail suggests leaves the artist “withered” and moving “towards sublimation and metonymies to…express the torment of her condition.”