Still Life, Hammer, and Nails

Paintings on the wall, moved around, hung, and contemplated, a layering of time and story.

Faded watercolor swatches from a kindergarten project. Photo: A. Cowen

Happy Sunday!

I was thinking about saying hello, and where that might lead me, what note to play, what tenor to strike. I am running in place, or so it seems. Sitting in place may be more apt. Most days, I am not sure I am moving at all.

While thinking about saying hello and what words that involves, what lines from the week, what attempts at inspiring you, connecting with you, prompting a moment of reflection, picking at a layer of peeling wallpaper to see what memories rise to the surface, I looked up and saw a painting I hung last week. It isn’t a new painting, but hanging it meant taking some other things down, shuffling things in and out of view.

As things were packed up for my son's move as he gets ready to start graduate school, I dragged out a large box of paintings that have been standing in the boys’ room for the last four years. They have been stashed there, a holding pattern in these transitional years, but at some point, things become fixtures. They stand in one place, taking up space, unnoticed, as if they simply belong there. They needed to be sorted. Decisions made. Space freed up. Things moved to the basement (which feels like a rodent-lined kiss of death). The house can’t simply be a storage container for the remnants of all the years that led to now. There are realities to this moment.

In going through the box of paintings, he decided to take a number of pieces with him. One that got pushed aside with a wrinkle of the nose was a large still life. I think it may have been the first still life from high school (at the local public school of the arts). It’s a very classic style still life, several different sizes and shapes of bottles and vases, a pear, a lime, a cream pitcher, a hardback book, multiple colored fabrics with folds catching the light, and a framed painting in the back of this assembled grouping, a painting of an odd little jester doll with curly hair and harlequin-printed clothes. Maybe it’s a portrait of a young girl. I’ve never been sure. In this portrait, the doll (or girl dressed as a jester) is sitting sideways, just off the edge of a straight-back chair. It's an unexpected detail, this jester, diffuse and just abstract enough to raise questions, to hint at story.

(One of my favorite reads in the last few years was the long Realm of the Elderlings series by Robin Hobb. I can’t see this small jester in this painting now without thinking of the Fool, a major character in all of the Fitz books.)

Seeing this painting in the pile of rejects, things he wasn’t interested in keeping with him, I pulled it out.

A few days before this, in talking about some of the paintings that were already being moved around in the house (even before he riffled through the box), someone suggested I take down two pieces that have hung on the wall for many years: a framed set of four “vehicle” drawings from his toddler days and a very faded set of watercolor swatches marking “100 days of school” from kindergarten. That was such an awesome project for that assignment. (It is a shame it faded as it did. Even though it was hung on a wall out of direct light, many of the squares look completely empty or washed out now.) Both boys did watercolor swatches for the classic "100 days" project. One did squares. A few years later, the other did circles. I'm glad we didn't glue Cheerios. There is nothing wrong with that (or the host of other crafty approaches that show up to mark the 100th day), but I've always loved the grids of paint swatches they each made in kindergarten.

(Only one was ever framed. The second set of swatches is tacked to the wall with a thumbtack in the room where I work. Oddly, that one hasn't faded. It still brightly displays vivid blues and greens, a few oranges and some colors in between.)

Contemplating the still life, which is one of the only paintings that has a wood frame, homemade at the time because it was prepared for the freshman art show (and I believe we may have “purchased” it that year), I took down the older pieces, the oldest things on the walls from the kids, and hung the still life from the existing nail. It's a small wall, but it fits. Other than two small nails below it where one of the other frames had been, it looks like this piece has always been there, tucked in next to the window.

(A few days later, my mind still holds the image of the watercolor swatches and vehicles hanging in this space. I feel their absence even as I appreciate the change. I think, of course, of the beautiful layering in Here, by Richard McGuire. Check out Episode 319: Translucency.)

Minty Green with a Flash of Red

Today, the still life catches my eye, and something about it, I love. Something in the color of a bright minty turquoise vase, in the light coming from the left, in the quiet, and maybe even in the mysterious presence of the painting of the doll, the jester clothes, the painting within the painting. I love the unexpected red on the book cover, and the odd placement of the creamer on top of the book. (I imagine he might have thought that was a coffee cup, but that’s just a guess.) There is something in the light in the piece. It warms me. It makes me look. My eyes move between the objects, bouncing over reflections, taking in colors, shapes, circular openings, and the golden drape of the cloth on which everything sits.

What a gift, a quiet gift, an unexpressed gift, to have someone spend such time contemplating our work.

(I wonder what color you would say that minty green vase is. Turquoise? Aqua? I saw a metal stool at the secondhand furniture store last week that was a similar color, though maybe a bit more green and a bit lighter. I loved it. I really wanted to throw it in the car, to have a life where a minty green stool makes some kind of sense.)

In looking through the box of paintings, this one didn’t tug at him. This isn’t a piece he would show, and I am reminded, of course, how we each view our own work differently, how art is so often in the eye of the beholder. We sometimes love pieces because of the history they contain, because of context and memory and how all of that layers on top of what we see. We each bring something of our own to the viewing. The artist also pegs pieces in a continuum of time and learning and living, a spectrum of color and subject, technique, skill, and place. This piece, with its old-school feel, is an outlier, maybe, simply because it is a still life, a group of objects that hold no intrinsic meaning for him, no story. This was an exercise. For me, somehow, the pull is in the implied story, in the sensitivity of color and light, in the juxtaposition of things.

Capturing Light

When the sorting of the box happened, I took a barn painting down from a different wall. Realizing that everything could move, that even he wasn’t attached to every piece, I added the barn to his pile to either take or store, and I moved a painting from the mantle (where several had been stacked) into its space. In doing so, I revealed a painting that had been partially obscured on the mantle, a beautiful coffee shop interior, a softly red painting of light coming through a window and spilling onto the wall and an empty table with four chairs. This painting is warm. Inviting. Life is unfolding outside the window, but the interior beckons you in.

Paintings like these have everything to do with why we talked a lot about Edward Hopper during his middle and high school years. Everything was about light. Next to this red interior painting stands one of my favorites, a white Victorian house on a street corner in San Francisco, the beautiful curve of  octagonal windows, the sun illuminating one side of the building. That one, too, is about light, and line, the lines from a utility pole and wires, the crosswalk on the street, the fire escape on the building, a multitude of windows and framing, and the lines of the building itself as the viewer gets just the hint of rounding the corner.

As he thought about his paintings over the next day, he came in at one point scanning the walls and mantle. I knew as soon as he saw the red interior, it would be added to his pile. “I want to keep that one,” I said quickly, although surely I said it a bit differently. He laughed, but he was puzzled. “I thought there was another one there.” I shrugged, playfully. “Nope,” I said. “No idea what you’re talking about,” even as, with my eyes, I guided him to where I had relocated the other one. That one he can take. 

I realize that we have a wealth of his art sitting in the house, and that it has always been on display here as a loan. (I had already laid claim to the Victorian, which I feel bad about because it is such a beautiful piece. Someday, it should go with him wherever he is, but right now, I am not sure even what the mantle would look like if it was removed. It sits in front of the large grid of monoprints from our final preschool auction. These things all feel tied together in terms of the burst of color and art from that space. The red interior may actually be my favorite. The two, side by side, are somehow an anchor. (“But isn’t the Christmas tree blocking that view,” you might ask? You know me too well. Yes. But these paintings are still always visible. And yes, I am now tired of the tree.)

A glimpse of two of the paintings mentioned, both painted by a high school student. Photo: A Cowen

Hammer and Nails

He took a box of paintings with him. Having read the lease, which precludes adhesives, I tucked a hammer and a baggie of small nails into my bag, just in case. On the second move-in day, he hung his first gallery. He was clear he wanted things to be asymmetric. He seemed to think I would object to that approach, which I thought was funny because pretty much everything in our house is asymmetric, intentionally or not.

He hung the first few canvases, which felt like part of claiming the space. It was fascinating to step back and watch this process, to think about what might be going on in his head, to think about what this represents. Hanging his work... a flag in the sand.... a claiming of self. Hanging his work as a first step in a mostly empty room… it felt important. As a parent, watching, it felt like it said so much about him. As a PhD student in math, that hanging his art was one of the first things he wanted to do in his first apartment was perfect and somehow reassuring.

(There is nothing in my house or on my walls of my own. I think about that sometimes. Of course, I am not a painter. But I know that isn’t the whole story.)

Looking now at the still life, I am glad he didn't want to take it. I know it’s in the realm of “school exercise,” but something about it makes me smile. I am not looking at it with an eye to critique. Something about it, holistically, speaks to me. I had no idea when I hung it in that spot that night that I would even notice it again.

He hasn’t sorted out how to paint yet from his new place. Oil paint stinks. Even if he painted on the square of concrete outside the front door, there isn't anywhere he'll be able to leave the easel inside to air. This summer, the basement has perpetually smelled like oil from a series of paintings he did, inspired by a new relationship and the wildness and whimsy of poppies.

I would suggest pen and ink or some other form of paint. But I know such suggestions are just noise.

Seeing Color

In the funny way things go, we admired his palette on the walls, the way the paintings, all together, highlight his palette, and then had silly disagreements about color on the drive home. We've had several such arguments through the years. "That woman has on brown pants." "No, they are purple." It sounds like he and his friends have similar arguments. A favorite and well-worn shirt is rust or maybe even a dark terracotta or possibly burnt sienna. It was a close, but darker, pairing with the Golden Gate Bridge as we drove over, having been rerouted because of a highway closure. He says it is red.

He has the hands and eye of an artist. But I can't explain how he labels color at all.

Back when I was in high school and away at a summer program, I had my first philosophy class. I remember being so struck by the simple reality that we don't really know what we each see when we say something is "blue" (or any color). That awareness has stayed with me all these years. We assume we are all talking about the same thing when we use the same words, but we don’t really know how we individually perceive those things.

I am terrible at naming colors and describing what I see. Every time I do a "track the light" or "share the light at the top of the hill" project, I find myself at a loss. The shirt though.... isn't red.

The paintings on the wall .... they are stunning. They are the beginnings of his own gallery, his own salon space. He probably doesn't even know or have that context. It simply is.

Even as someone who has most often worked in black and white, I think about color and palette a lot. From knitting to quilting to work in my illustrated journal, I am always pondering questions of color. I find color a mystery in far too many ways. One of the things I have really enjoyed in exploring digital art in recent months is pulling in palette swatches. I sometimes look at a page of swatches and find that there are so many sets I really like. I keep trying to figure out what my palette is. I know my choices may be different for life and art, but every time I look at swatch sets, I wonder who I am in color.

Seeing his palette on the walls, a unification of color that only becomes clear in seeing the grouping, was really interesting. Voice, of course, takes a variety of shapes.

So does growing up. And growing older.

Quotes for the week:

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Pablo Picasso

“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” — Claude Monet

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” — Henry Ward Beecher

“I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” — Pablo Picasso

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” — Andy Warhol

Book/Miscellaneous Notes

• There are a few “creativity”-focused days on the calendar this week. It seems like a perfect time to revisit favorites from Peter Reynolds, like The Dot, Ish, So Few of Me, Playing from the Heart, and The North Star. (If Reynolds is new to you, please do take a look at his books to share with children in your life!)

• There is a “coloring” day this week. There are obviously tons of books out there for those doing adult coloring, but I want to mention the classic, throw-back, Richard Burrows books for kids that invite you to create geometric patterns, like Images, or a newer version like Crystal Cave: The Ultimate Geometric Coloring Book. (I’ve never been a “color something someone else drew” person, but it’s a really popular hobby for a lot of people. You might take a look at Johanna Basford books if you are starting down this path. How to Draw Inky Wonderlands: Create and Color Your Own Magical Adventure, on how to draw your own, might be interesting, too. I’m going to take a look at that one next week.)

• I read Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring (by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Josh Cochran) this week at the library and really enjoyed it.

• I think I am really good at habit formation, but I’m feeling a bit adrift overall. Atomic Habits (by James Clear) is one of those books I’ve checked out a bunch of times and read bits of and know the gist of. It’s one of many books I feel I need to “properly” give a read. I just checked out an e-book version again and think I might systematically go through it in coming weeks…. might be a good sketchnote practice project, too. (You should read along.)

Made It?

Thank you for reading. I’m feeling dejected about my current trajectory. I feel like I need to make a resume rather than write this post, truly. And Instagram, my favorite space, is leaving me feeling like a ghost. That there was an unexpected “stop-gap” in this moving out/moving in cycle has also left me on pause. Next week, I’ll be finding my footing, knowing time has moved on.

I appreciate those of you reading and commenting here. Even when my comment nudges are silly, it makes me smile every time I see your comments come through.

Comment hammer if you have art on your walls from friends or family.

Comment tiara if you have your own work hanging.

Comment with the name of a favorite artist (any) if you’ve had the same pieces of art hanging (mostly) for years.

Comment dot if you are a Peter Reynolds fan.

Comment triangle if you remember a Richard Burrows coloring book from your own childhood.

Comment vanilla if you just want to comment but feel encumbered by all the choices.

Finally, what color is your sky right now?

Thank you for reading. Have a good week.

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Illustrate Your Week — Week 37

The new prompts for Week 37 have been posted.

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