Look, Write: Meditations, Essays and Ekphrasis on Art in San Francisco

On the Julia Morgan church, in the Haight Ashbury, a black angel sits staring at passers by with a bemused smile. The clouds behind her are the flattest white of cotton, in a sky as blue as a baby’s bedroom. She used to be a white angel, with pale skin and a blond page boy, flirtatious in her catholic school girl uniform. When she changed races her posture, dress and the proportions of her face stayed the same. Only the hairstyle and skin changed — her hair morphed into two long dark braids, with a feather sticking up off to one side. Her skin is now the color of morning coffee, laced with heavy cream.

The church where she sits, cocooned in her mural, houses the Haight Ashbury food program. For close to thirty years the program fed, provided job training and a daily community for hundreds of San Franciscos’ homeless and needy. Recently, facing federal funding cuts, and the swift gentrification of the Haight, it cut its daily operations down to a once a week food pantry. When the soup kitchen closed the patrons who lined up daily along my street, who provided me with most of my social encounters, disappeared. Amoung them was the man who painted the mural of the angel.

When I began to notice this man I called him the hustler. He wore aviator sunglasses, and partially unbuttoned gigilo shirts, remnants, I guessed, of a former studliness. He rode a bicycle and trailed behind very young girls on Haight street, girls no older than his angel, who perhaps bought drugs from him, and let him be their guide or mascot to the touristy streets of a former social revolution.

He had a bit of a mullet, too tight pants, and a bicycle — all the anachronisms  the young hipsters around the Haight find delightfully tacky and try to mimic in an I’m-so-cool-I-can-afford-to-be-tacky kind of way. I felt patronizingly sad for him. His wardrobe was stuck in the early 70’s, while his face and body aged. The last traces of handsomeness were threatened by sinking fat pockets and the hardening of muscles. He had the look and volatile energy of a meth addict, and I stayed away from him. He wasn’t one of the soup kitchen regulars I said hello to.

Yet when he started painting the mural on the front of the church I began to think differently of him. Other things were changing as well. As renters on Waller Street we were recipients of the “Waller Street Association Newsletter,” although we were not invited to the association’s meetings or Christmas parties. The newsletter was geared toward the “clean up” and “safety” of Waller street and the Haight in general. According to the newsletter all the social services around the Haight — the Homeless Youth Alliance, the free medical clinics, and especially the soup kitchen were floundering, not due to lack of funding, but because they were mismanaged. They attempted to serve too many, left too many sleeping on their street, and sitting on their front stoops during the day, deterring them, the nice landed gentry, from coming out of their houses and patronizing the businesses on Haight street. The newsletter blamed these organizations for perpetuating the problems they attempted to assuage. In reality I think the homeless served to remind the organization of the unpleasant downside to their free-market wealth, of sickness and mortality. Although they were careful not to say this. Instead the newsletter complained of specific cosmetic issues and safety: the church was an eye sore and possibly dangerous. It’s paint was peeling, a few drain pipes looked loose, there were a boards up in some of the church’s stained glass windows, and people left piles of discarded clothes on the sidewalk for the homeless to rummage through.

Concurrent with the newsletters, the regulars at the soup kitchen banded together to fight for their turf. A few men I didn’t know erected scaffolding and began to paint the three story Mission style façade of the church, and the Hustler began his mural on wall in front of the stair well. Tony, a small speechless man, who would waggle his finger at me if I walked too close to broken glass, or dog poop on the sidewalk, was let loose to do his compulsive cleaning. Tony was ubiquitous on the street, always with some makeshift janitorial tool in hand. Now he was given a proper broom. He swept and pruned the bushes infront of the church parking lot until they were completely chewed up, with just a few leaves clinging for dear life. He also tried to clean our windows, and the windows of the homeowners along the street. I’d be in our apartment alone, when our door would start shaking as if someone were trying to break in. I’d remember that it was Tony washing the pane of glass with his dirty mop, leaving brown streaks, where none had been before.

Charlie a professional recycler, who I imagined operated as the kitchen’s bouncer, seemed to suddenly take his job more seriously as well. Previously, this large bald man in a black beanie cap, this man who looked liked a guy the mafia might hire, would sit perched on his stool at the entrance to the kitchen, a thug like sphinx. He smoked quietly, head thrown back, looking out at passerby with slit eyes. The first time he said hello to me I was completely rattled. I was pregnant and in the middle of my third trimester, so perhaps he took pity on me. “When are you due,” he yelled out. From then on every time I passed, he or one of the regulars would yell, “Coming soon?” And I’d say “I hope so!” By the very end of my pregnancy, as the newsletter came with more frequency, Charlie was up and pacing the line. If a patron was holding forth too loudly on God and the Universe, or yelling greetings at passers by with aggressive jollity, he would tell them to keep it down.

Then there was the hustler. He sat on a plastic crate his supplies laid out in front of him. With what seemed to be a great effort, he confronted his angel. He worked all morning, took a break, and came back to pace around in front of the mural in the afternoon. His process involved almost as much paceing as it did sitting and staring. It was no surprise that the outline emerging on the wall was the same height, and build as him. The figure even mirrored his intense posture as he sat on the sidewalk scrutinizing it. Her legs were crossed, she leaned forward, elbow on chin. There they sat, nose to nose, the painter and his empty outline.

The church’s façade gradually brightened from dull beige to a pale yellow, gold paint was added to the lintels, and the street, thanks to Tony was clean, but the artist progressed more slowly. I thought I understood him. Just as the renovations began I’d given birth to my son. I was amazed at his beauty, and at my ability to bring him into the world, and now I was afraid I might mess him up. I was terrified of my responsibility, doubtful of my ability to just sit and be lovingly present with him, when I had mind that was restless and easily bored. I imagined that the hustler too, had a hard time being present with his angel, or worried about his ability to finish what he’d started. On one of my many walks, with baby in stroller, I told him that his outline looked good. Still, he sat staring.

Then one day he painted her shoes — two black disks with a strap – simple Mary Jane’s. Next, he painted her white bobby socks, and then rising up from them two legs, one crossed behind the other. The front leg looked in proportion to the leg tucked behind, but, alas, compared to the rest of her body appeared stretched by a fun house mirror; very out of proportion. I thought I understood this too. This was the kind of distortion that happened when you stared too long at just one element of a painting, or any other work, ignoring the rest. It was a perseverating myopia and overvaluation that I was all too familiar with cooped up in my small apartment, staring at my baby, imagining that I alone was responsible for his health and well being; that every little thing I did or didn’t do would significantly impact him. I forgot that there was a whole world out side that would teach and shape him, if I let it in. I didn’t understand that if I stepped back, he would do most of his growing on his own.

It was probably a relief to worry about something other than my baby. And so I worried about this man and his angel. He started to bring some of his other artwork and prop it up in front of the mural, maybe for motivation. Perhaps it was for sale. They were canvasses of thick multicolor swirls of paint. I looked away, embarrassed, from these paintings, unable to offer a compliment. I was afraid he would interpret them as wicked LSD trips. I’d found out from one of the volunteers that he truly was a recovering meth addict, and I thought maybe the paint swirls were all he had the concentration for. But then one day I walked by and the bottom half of the angel was sitting in a field of grass and flowers.

The grass was clumpy, rising up in patches out of brown earth. The flowers were impressionistic — smudged in the wind or caught in the light, seen from a distance. That the smudged flowers were actually in the foreground didn’t matter. They were satisfying, and I imagined the environment would provide the angel with a safe peaceful place to manifest, or come into being. The next day the artist had extended the environment of the mural out onto the sidewalk. He’d painted a blue bubble-like arc, dotted with grass; a tiny front porch, brushed over by glitter. His angel needed still more space, another protective dimension. Perhaps he imagined her standing up and stepping outside of the wall to stretch her too long legs? Perhaps this piece of painted sidewalk was for him: a place for him to stand and be transported into the mural?

After the Angel’s “front porch” was added, the painting progressed faster, albeit with the same idiosynchratic results.  Her arms, one pitched to prop up her chin, the other draped over her legs, were out of proportion in a way that somehow balanced her stretched shins; her white blouse and black vest were stiff, flat planes, but a scarf swung over her knee loosened the ensemble. The modeling of her hand was crude, but her face was finely detailed. She had that intimate look in her eye, the look that said she’d been around and knew a few things, and maybe even knew you. I stood smiling in front of her the first time I saw her completed. I had my baby with me, and said “Look, the Angel is finished.” My baby was becoming more of a person as well, and I was more comfortable with him. I was confident that I probably wouldn’t space out and let him roll off the changing table, confident that he wouldn’t look at me and immediately absorb my worries and fears. The angel’s completion was a good omen – a sign that things pulled themselves together, there was order in the universe, struggles passed.

It was then, about a week later that someone took a knife and scratched two x’s across the angel’s eyes. At first I imagined some lonely sociopath, waking up under her at night, offended by the forthrightness of her gaze. Later I wondered if the X’s weren’t a comment on the artist’s meth addiction. Perhaps the angel was a stand in for the artist, and the X’s represented the way a meth addict saw the world — the restricted vision of the lows, and the fractured kaleidoscopic highs, through eyes that were prisms and prisons.

A day later I found the artist riding his bike in circles in front of the mural. His face looked more gaunt than I remembered, his hair a little oilier than usual.

I stopped and asked, “Do you know who did this?” I hoped to show support, to let him know I’d noticed the X’s and didn’t like it.

“Who?” he said, turning to me accusingly. “What do you know?”

Startled, I kept walking. “Nothing” I said, “I’m just sorry it happened.”

I was half way down the block when he yelled at my back, “Oh I know who did this, I know who did this, and he’s a dead man.” He was quiet for a moment then perhaps remembering that he knew me yelled, “peace.”

Around this time my husband and I left for two weeks. We took our son to visit his grandparents across the country. When we returned the street was strangely quiet and the sidewalks no longer clean. Tony and Charlie and the other regulars around the street had vanished. Despite efforts the “clean up” and “beautify” the soup kitchen, it had still closed. For a couple days I avoided looking at the mural, I didn’t want to see the violent X’s over the angel’s eyes. When I did finally look up I was surprised find that the she had changed. She was now a dark angel, and the skin color suited her. Before her skin had been a little flat and pasty, and the blond page-boy, too oddly sexy for a little girl. I liked her long dark braids. Her face looked more stoic, and thoughtful, and the artist had done his best to cover the gouges over her eyes.

Impulsively I walked up to the mural. I stood inside the grassy bubble painted onto the sidewalk and ran my fingers over her eyes. It felt like the right thing to do – as if I was laying something to rest – the blond angel, a difficult passage of my life, the struggle of the artist to complete the mural, the struggle of the regulars to keep the kitchen open? I’m not exactly sure.

Eventually the soup kitchen opened back up on Saturdays for a farmers style market. Families in need now come to load up bags of groceries for the week. The kitchen is filled with a different kind of patron, people who have homes, but are still struggling. Occasionally someone on the street will stop me and ask when the soup kitchen will open for daily meals. Occasionally someone traveling with a backpack and sleeping bag will spend the night on the painted patch of grass under the angel, hoping for a meal in the morning.

I was swallowed up by it. It’s size and shape like that of a small movie screen. Elliott Hundley’s collage “Agave of the Bacchae” is oceanic, made of thousands of bits of paper, hovering one over another, attached by long beaded pins or glued to the subtle rise and fall of the collage’s seemingly moving surface. Each cut out piece is its own discrete image: a sea shell, the withholding face of a beautiful woman, an exotic flower, a piece of fruit; yet these individual images are orchestrated, layered over larger images that fold them into swirls of stormy atmosphere. As a whole, the piece is a hurricane of female sexuality that’s just swept through a mardi grass celebration — glossy strings and beads dangle from the pins holding the images down.

The effect really is dazzling at first. Although, on closer look a bit comical, all the cut pieces are either womens’ heads, fertility totems, or the above mentioned stand-ins for female genitalia – flowers, fruit, ect. Granted, there were a few surprises. I saw a walnut and something that looked like the chopped end of a celery stick, rimmed in red. Hmmm…

Here and there within the collage, to contrast with the minutia are large looming heads of more mature women, mother figures, one can only guess, and then the repeated motif of a smaller figure — a weeping woman holding a severed male head between her bare legs and thighs. This is when I have my “Aha,” moment. And realize I’m enveloped in a huge beautifully, and meticulously constructed, vagina dentata. Could all those tiny white bits of seashell on the ends of pins be teeth?

I begin to get a whiff of a bad break up.

Huge swallowing, swirling, vagina imagery, is not necessarily misogynist anymore. Though De Kooning, Picasso, and many of the surrealists did their best to preserve it as a symbol of the powerful hence castrating woman, recent artists such as, Allyson Mitchell, and Gretchen Schemerhorn have been using it as a way to celebrate female power.

“Agave of the Bacchae,” reads more like old school vagina symbolism. It’s inspiration, the play The Bacchae, by Euripides, features a troop of easily corruptible women, driven into wild ecstatic frenzy with just a flick of the wrist by the rock star Dionysus. The collage is a vivid representation of their sexual frenzy, and also a before and after portrait of Agave. Before: she is the icy untouchable mother figure, reflected in the many beautiful but distant heads of women that peer ominously out of the collage. After: she is the weeping woman with the severed head between her thighs, at the moment she realizes that her trophy head, won after a night of bachic revelry, is in fact her son’s.

“Oops.”  Big mistake.

But within the context of the ancient play, and this collage, women, those unstable shape shifters, especially those with the power of motherhood, are capable of anything.

Now granted, mothers do have a lot of power and some mothers are of the scary, castrating type. But I think the more interesting question is “What turns a mother into a monster in the first place?” Could it have to do with living in a culture that still distrusts women in leadership positions? Who is making art right now, about the delimas, power struggles and complications of mother hood?

I’ll also grant that girls have been known to go a little bachic crazy at say, Beatles concerts. Or, for me it was Duran Duran. But that was more about individuating from my parents, bonding with the other girls, choosing to idolize the band member I thought I had most in common with. For me it was Nick, because he looked nice, and a little like a girl. The frenzy and the fanhood was more about testing out our identities than loosing our identities and becoming wild mutilating beasts.

Finally, I should add, that this is only one of several pieces in Hundley’s series inspired by Euripides. I’m sure there are other narratives and themes at play in the other pieces, as there are other narratives and themes at play “The Bacchea.” But this piece was disappointing in the predictability of its misogyny.  And I was left  wishing the artist had worked out these issues in art school – and hadn’t been granted and entire wall at the SF MOMA. I’m still going keep an eye out for his work though, because, formally, the piece was amazing.

I’ve been tagged by a pigeon! A life-sized pigeon! Spray-painted on my apartment building. It rests approximately five feet under my window, and it roosts all day long.

I noticed it around the time I began to remember a feeling from my childhood, a feeling that objects had secret lives of their own. Not only my dolls and stuffed animals, but glowing light fixtures and funny colored rocks. It was a weirdly religious feeling, which probably made up for the fact that my family was not religious, while most of my friend’s families went to church, where they got free doughnuts, and had special youth group parties. Probably, I developed this philosophy to make up for not being part of these clubs. This philosophy that certain object in the universe where imbued with special meaning, with clues to help guide me in the right direction. If I looked carefully, paid special attention to strange objects I would be rewarded. I was part pantheist, part narcissist, in my belief that the universe was putting forth special codes just for me.

And now that feeling has come back, and been enhanced by the arrival of the pigeon, the mysteriously roosting pigeon. I know in my adult brain that a conspiring universe didn’t put it there. But I like to indulge myself with the idea that it was put there by a person in my small universe, someone who was sending me, in particular, a message.

I have a couple reasons to think this.

First of all, I swear the pigeon wasn’t there before, and therefore intended for some previous tenant. I’d have seen it. I’ve lived in the building for four years, and I’ll admit, I sometimes like to look up into my own windows, at my own building front when I’m walking on the opposite side of the street.  I pretend I’m a stranger, peering in, in order to see what my life looks like from the outside.

Second, the pigeon was placed too high on the building for someone to have casually put it there. And it’s too far down from my window for someone, maybe a previous tenant, to have perilously leaned out over the ledge and painted it there. Its installation required planning, intention, or at least a ladder, a dark night, and a back back of supplies.

I have a suspect. There is a man who frequents the coffee shop at the end of my block and who never smiles at me, even though I smile at him – if only with my dopey, meek smile that acknowledges him as a regular in my orbit, but doesn’t exactly invite him in. He looks directly at me, at the side of my face, that is. I feel it. I then look directly at him, because, well, he’s not exactly intimidating. But he’s already lighting his cigarette, head to the side, taking a drag. We do this almost every time I see him. We do this so often that it feels like out ritual. If I actually said “hello,” I’d be crossing a boundary.

He’s a little man, his face is small and mouse like, and I’d say he’s about forty although he wears a black hoodie, and has wires dangling from his ears like a twenty something hipster.  He has the look of a street artist, a gentle anarchist. He carries a backpack and hunches over on the bench outside the café. I’ve never seen him talk to anyone, but I can tell he’s listening. He’s interested in people. He looks part Mexican, part Anglo, and many parts geek. And reminds me of the shy Latinos in high school, who spent all their extra time in the Mr. Gabitzch’s art room, working with the air-brushes on elaborate designs to transfer onto their low-riders. Or, at least this is where I imagined they would put them. They might have had parents who owned Subarus.

The only problem with him as a suspect is motive. The motive I have in mind stems mostly from my theory that he’s shy, which, my husband says is my theory about many people, and probably stems from the fact that I am shy too. To which I  said “well maybe one shy person is good at spotting another shy person,” to which he then said,  “maybe you’re spending too much time by yourself,” and  “Maybe you’re becoming a crazy person.”

Still, I persist with my logic: shy people are often very artistic. They are people who like to deliver messages in clandestine and carefully crafted ways. And the pigeon, although it may look haphazard at first, is really very meticulous and lovely.

The pigeon was made with a stencil. In order to make a stencil you have to take the time to think backwards. You have to think of what a normal person see as fullness, as an emptiness. You have to see shapes as negative spaces. Perhaps this is more easily done by a person who sees himself, at least in daylight hours, as a ghost. Someone who wears black hoodies, and doesn’t talk to anyone. Perhaps this man comes alive at night, when he does his tagging. Perhaps this pigeon is his calling card, his wink at me – his assurance that when we do the pigeon dance of bobbing our heads and blinking our eyes at each other, it’s not for nothing. I believe it’s his way of saying – I’m such a cool and secretly shy street artist that I can’t say “hi” during the day, and I apologize – but I do see you. You are my neighbor.

I imagine him at night, three maybe four in the morning, when most of the lights are off on our many windowed street. He’s climbing, spider like, in his black pants, black hoodie, up his lightweight ladder. Just below our window he takes the stencil and a can of black spray paint from his backpack. Millions of tiny paint particles fly through the air. Shhhh, shhh, shhhhh. It’s as if he’s hushing anyone who may waken at this moment back to sleep. When he pulls the stencil away, there’s a bit of overspray to the left, a slick line that explodes outward, the particles getting fewer and finer and they move from the point of impact. But this is part of the effect; it’s what makes these tags look haphazard, impersonal, ephemeral and cool – like the mark of a bandit, someone just passing though. But I know better.

He and I have something in common. He can create a wing out of a negative space. I can create a story out of almost nothing.

My husband is right about one thing. San Francisco can be a lonely city.

“Sad Dreams on a Cold Morning” by Joanne Leonard, 1971 — ( I saw this as part of a retrospective on American photography at the SFMOMA)

Nude first. Nude lying on bed, face down.  Anonymous, and almost genderless. A pale light on butt and thighs softens the figures muscles, melts them into round pools. Or perhaps warms them, makes them rise like dough, into a feminine fullness. Yet the figure is long and lean. It’s calf muscle is a clenched fist, a firm apple. This is a man. A delicious man, and, yes, this is what I’d like to think.

Still, the gender ambiguity of this body gives me permission to look at it in a fully sensual and interested way. If I was certain it was a woman I might refuse to look, refuse to align my gaze with “the male gaze,” (because the figure does seem to be at least partly objectified). If I knew absolutely that it was a man I might feel self conscious or voyeuristic, although, I admit, I would still look. How could I not? The nude is the center of the photo. A beautiful langourous, passed out nude, dished right up for me. The walls of the room seem to converge with the frame of the photo – it’s as if I have my own private viewing booth.

But this photo, I think is more than a voyeuristic thrill at invading a sleeping privacy.  For one, the figure doesn’t look fully asleep. One knee is hitched up, in a desperate swim position, the way you swim when you don’t really know how to swim, and perhaps are about to drown. An arm is folded under the chest, it’s circulation perhaps slowed to a crawl of pin pricks. If the figure is really sleeping it will be a dead arm when the sleeper wakes, I think. It will need to be resurrected and it will ache at being unfolded. But I don’t think the figure is sleeping. No, this is a pose full of the kind of angles that would be appropriate for a life drawing class studying musculature. Yes, the body seems to know it’s being looked at, and I like this. I like this slight disruption to the fiction of sleep. And of the fiction of the notion that you can capture reality in a photo.

Next, to add to the staginess of the photo, there is the transparent curtain, tinged blue and hovering over the bedroom from top to bottom. At first the curtain makes the nude seem particularly on display. It enhances the eroticness. The curtain makes the nude feel cloistered and antique, mystiquey — an exotic specimin within a cabinet. It also enhances the fiction that the figure is embedded, or shrouded within a dream. The curtain invites you to hold your hand out toward the photo, extend a finger and pull it back. That is, until the slanted folds in the curtain transform into slender birch trees. And until the entire curtain transforms into a landscape.

What I love about this photo is the way it mixes up space, pulls you in and thrusts you back out. Just as I think I’m peering in, penetrating a private space, that fiction is shattered by the revelation of the birch tree forest. I thought I was moving inside, but suddenly I’m outside, in this dreamy blue space, amid white birches with golden leaves, and then suddenly I’m inside again, inside the forest, which is perhaps a projection of the dreamers mind — a dream-scape. But then, looking up and into to the framed picture on the wall of the room, I’m thrust out again. There is nothing to look into here – just a shiny glare on the glass. I try  the open window, perhaps this will be another pocket of discovery – but within the window the forest appears flat. There is no overlay of images here to create the illusion of depth. This is a wallpaper like forest, and this photo is a moody box of tricks.

“The Brown Sisters” by Nicholas Nixon

As a fiction writer, I look at photographs to find stories. I Iove to sift through the old photos at antique stores, those with the cracked emulsions, those that fit nicely inside my hand. I like portraits and snap shots of people most of all. In them I look for loaded gestures: a nervous hand suspended mid-movement, a drifting eye – an expression that suggests a history, or a consequence, and hence collapses time into a tight ball of narrative possibility.

And I’ll admit, I love to find, under the obscuring layers of time and a changed culture, that unrehearsed look of fear, poorly disguised delight, or even anger — the raw emotion that was, perhaps, not meant to be caught on film.  Theorist Roland Barthes called this the “punctum,” that place in a photograph that “pierces the viewer.” When I see it, I feel a jolt of recognition; I feel connected to the subject in a primal way. Ironically, it’s also the place that launches me away from the subject into a fiction of my own devising. This was my experience with “The Brown Sisters,” a series of portraits by Nicholas Nixon, on display now as part of the SFMOMA’s seventy fifth anniversary show.

When I came across Nixon’s portraits in the museum, they didn’t immediately speak to me. Here were four rather conventional looking sisters, appearing over and over again in different postures and at different ages. They were pleasant I thought, romantically wind blown and pretty. The sisters stood against the ocean, a field, or sat under a tree. Yet I kept looking, walking back and forth across the gallery where all thirty or so portraits hung in three neat rows. There was something under their pleasant silence.

As I read the MOMA’S placard I learned that the photographs were taken with a large format eight by ten camera, which allowed for great precision of detail. I looked more closely at the photos. The detail was fine, even revealing. I could see each freckle on the women’s skin. If I wanted to, I could track the slow emergence of an expression line or wrinkle as these sisters passed through puberty, became women, and entered middle age.

Later, I learned that Nixon imposed several constraints on this project, in a sense, treating the sisters as subjects in a controlled experiment. There was only one photo shoot a year, from which Nixon chose just one representative photo, the sisters were always shot in natural light, they were always shot from the front, and staged in the same order: Laurie, on the far right, then Heather, Bebe (who I learned was the artists wife) and Mimi. Because of this static framework, very subtle changes in these women could be observed from one year to the next. As I began to look at the photos individually and to link them together chronologically, my narrative mind became excited. I wondered: what stories could the women’s shifting facial expression, body language, and physical characteristics tell?

The first photo was taken, it seemed, at the onset of puberty. In it the sisters stand in a row, their shoulders caved inward slightly. Three of them cross their arms over their chests. They seem acutely aware of being assessed by their bodies. And for a good reason, I thought. They’re positioned, in a line up, a composition that invites an onlooker to compare them with each other. And as sisters, I imagined they were compared to one another too often to begin with. To add to their discomfort, there is more body and more skin on display in this photo than in later photos. Their long athletic limbs seem part of the point; they look coltish and boyish in short sleeves and jeans, trapped and bristling at being caught in the picture.

In this first picture, as well as the next few, the sisters don’t embrace, or tilt their heads in toward each other, as they do in the later photos. They stand close together; they even lean absentmindedly on each other. But their guarded stances, and challenging gazes make them appear to be inhabiting separate psychological spaces. It’s as if they are emoting an invisible barrier of individuality, and thus, marking their own territories.

The second photo also felt charged, especially in its relation to the first. Here, just one year later, the sisters have switched from androgynous clothing to long loose fitting dresses, and there is melancholy in their posture and gazes. It’s as if they’ve been told to wear dresses for the photo, made to submit to a popular notion of femininity. Two of the girls’ gazes drift off to the side, but the other two have a slight thrust of defiance in their hips. They look straight at the viewer, challengingly, as if to say, say “yes I’m wearing a dress – but that doesn’t mean I’ve been tamed.”

It’s 1976 in this photo. The girls part their hair down the middle or simply brush it back from their faces, and let it fall. They are without makeup, which makes the strong bones, rather than the more feminine features of their face stand out. This lack of fuss over appearance remains steady for their forty documented years, with the exception of one sister. This exceptional sister begins to rim her eyes with dark eyeliner. Occasionally the same sister appears to have teased her curly hair into a lioness like mane.

Of all the sisters, I decided that the lioness with eyeliner was the most confident. Her wild hair and extended arms are often a compositional frame, and her eyes with their eyeliner are often a focal point. She struck me as the leader of the group, although, I couldn’t be sure. I also noticed that her face was round and cherubic compared to the other girl’s lean athletic looks. Perhaps, I thought, the dramatic eyeliner and fierce gaze was a way to downplay the femininity of her looks. Perhaps it was just a way to fit in.

But the woman who stood out the most was the sister I imagined to be the youngest. Her posture in the first photo is more than challenging. It’s surly. In this photo there is a definite sneer slipping through her lips. She is wiry, and explosive looking. She demands attention, although it seems as if she can’t help herself. She is the one, I thought, for whom feelings are closest to the surface, the one with the thinnest layer of self-control. Yes, this sister was the “punctum” of the group, “the raw emotion,” I thought. I immediately liked her.

Over the next several photographs, this youngest sister often breaks the symmetry of the lineup. In one photo her elbow is thrust out awkwardly; in another she leans so far into the foreground that she fills up most of the frame, as another sister’s arm reaches to pull her back, as if reining her in. In one of the rare early shots, in which she is not in the foreground, the wild sister leans against a wall and looks up at the ceiling, this time drawing attention by looking desperately bored.

Or, perhaps she stood out to me for this reason: as the girls pass into their forties and fifties, the wild sister, strangely, becomes the softest. Her face and body widen the most, and her eyes loose some of their outward focus; they turn inward and introspective. In the later photos this sister, who was once hard to hold, is full of embraces for her sisters. She seems grateful for her sisters’ presences, and proud to be standing with them. In the later photos, she is the one who looks as if she has had the hardest life.

But this is partly my narrative, of course, embedded with my own particular take on being a girl, a woman and a sister. And after the excitement of spinning and imposing my stories, I tired a bit, and wanted to leave the fiction writer part of my brain behind. I found myself drawn to the controlled and unmoving aspects of the photos, those aspects that hadn’t changed. I began to wonder if the unchanging elements weren’t more reliable indicators of the truth.

I began by studying the photos’ settings. It is always these four women, up-close, against a non-intimate, background: a stark beach, a field of grass, or an anonymous front porch. This blankness of setting suggest the women are objects of beauty, or that their forms and faces should be studied as exceptional, as standouts from the surroundings. And the women are beautiful. There is a strong family gene at work among the sisters. They all have cheekbones like wings that rise up and resist gravity, even as they age. There is also a similar Mona-Lisa-like set to the their mouths. This is no doubt, also partly genetic, but also an expression they seem to have agreed on. It’s a smile that says they have secrets they could reveal to you, and that they know you’re looking for them. It’s a smile that says they may coyly reveal just enough for you to start to form a story, but not enough for you to confirm one. They seem to say, “Be careful about how you look at us.”

With this warning in mind, I went back and scanned the photos again. I noticed a shot in which the woman I imagined to be the leader, looks extremely fragile. In this photo her darkly lined eyes retreat back into puffy skin, and she is cradled in the arms of the sister who I imagined to be the youngest, and wildest. Then, I found two pictures in which the wild sister, the one I assumed had the difficult life, looks radiantly happy, even serene.  Oops.

Even though these new discoveries blew my story, I didn’t really mind. The narratives I built around the photos were false starts, and the “punctums,” or moments of recognition were probably mostly subjective, yet the Brown sisters became more and more compelling as my narratives were thwarted. They became compelling for what they ultimately didn’t reveal. I was moved by the way the sisters seemed to protect themselves with their knowing smiles, and protect one another with their embraces, and by the way Nixon protected them as well. Nixon, after all, selected and arranged the shots carefully –in such away that they temp the viewer with suggestions of psychological narrative, yet refuse to reveal the womens’ secrets.

In the later photos of this series, the sisters’ energy is consistently focused toward each other. They face each other, bridge their arms, cuddle, play with, lean on, or support each other. In fact, even in the early photos, when the sisters appear to be absorbed in their own worlds, they connect compositionally through an extended arm, or through one sister in the foreground overlapping another in the background. The overall effect of this, when seen against their plain backgrounds, is that the sisters are of one body.

As I stepped back and looked at the group of photos together and from a distance, the sisters’ bodies and faces blurred, morphed into something like a wall, a rampart or a feature the “natural” landscape. The outlines of their united mass against the ocean or sky resembled shifting mountain ranges, or configurations of large stones.  After sitting gazing at them from a distance they started to become a landscape, a landscape that had weathered slightly, but remained cohesive and inscrutable.

And this is what I was happy to take away from my experience with these photos – not a story of the sisters’ individual struggles, but a story of their connectedness, of the commitment they make to come together every year to document their sisterhood, and on the safety and respite I imagine they provide for each other. When I look at them, I can imagine myself in their company. I imagine that they would keep my secrets too.

?

Dear reader,

I hope you will follow along with my mission to write, every couple of weeks, about a different work of visual art in the bay area.

I live in San Francisco, a city so full of visual information, that I constantly feel I’m missing something. There is art on the sides of cities busses, on posters taped to café windows, in the graffiti, and in images stenciled onto the sidewalk. And all of this is not to mention the galleries and museum here, which are bursting at the seams with exciting art. I acknowledge that I can’t possibly process everything I see during a day, and still, I often find myself in confusion over what to look at. It’s hard to choose when there are so many choices.  I end up, out of self-preservation, looking at the same things, or looking down at the sidewalk, blocking many things out.

I see this blog as a way to assuage my guilt about not looking, as a chance to set aside time to look deliberately, to sit quietly at a museum, park, or on the street, once every two weeks and let my mind wander over a single object, form its webs of associations, and narratives. I hope it will be a sort of meditative discipline, and, ultimately, a way to keep alive within me the pleasure of looking and writing about what I see.

I have a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on the interplay of the visual and the written. I know some about visual art but I don’t write from the perspective of an expert. I’m primarily a fiction writer, and someone who loves language. I look at art as a reader and a storyteller. I’m interested in how language transforms what we see, creates new realities out of visual and verbal mixtures. My inspiration for this project is partly Walter Pater’s call to pause on that art which ignites the imagination, which makes one “burn,” with a “hard gemlike flame,” and partly John Berger’s and Walter Benjamin’s call to use art for your own purposes, to playfully de-mystify it, to cut it out of it’s setting, and paste it into your own world.

I hope you enjoy!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!