1.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that drawing from photographs rather than from life was cheating. The same person who had marveled at a drawing moments before would look almost crestfallen to learn it was made using a photo reference. I grasped that there was some sort of moral failure implied. A lack of willingness to do the hard work, a sense of pale imitation, and also of immaturity. Later on (very recently in fact) I learned that there are two distinct, often overlapping skills involved: the framing, and the rendering. A drawing, the rendering, is evidence of attention paid over time. Framing is the choice of where to lay that attention. Working from a photo made by someone else means you followed their gaze and paid attention to where they laid theirs. Framing is the choice about what to leave in, and what to cut away, whether to crouch or to stand, whether to move in closer or back farther away. It’s wordlessly, across distance and time, pointing to something and saying, “look at that— do you see?”
Last Sunday I went to a dance lesson at a dance hall in a dead mall. The instructor, a big, black-haired Russian man in a crewelwork and tasseled satin track jacket, was just drawing up the metal gate and stood framed in the entryway, the only open storefront aside from the Macy’s at the far end. We were a small group and we started out learning the waltz. Sergei moved among us, making corrections and cracking jokes, needling the self-serious students. He adjusted my grip, knuckling my fingers over my partner’s hand “so the lady can show off all her rings,” he explained. We rotated among four different partners, and within a few minutes, I’d have known each one with my eyes closed. There was a tall, chipper guy who offered a lead so firm I half expected he’d just pick me up and set me down again wherever he wanted me to go. There was the one who muttered self critiques and offered no purchase for my hands. Sergei described the idea of “the frame”—the structure of the arms that communicates between the dancers. The frame must be sturdy enough to conduct the plans of one body into the response of the other. One of my partners had a persistent habit of lunging forward at me as his elbows collapsed. Our frame in shambles, his chest moved into the air space between us, and I looked down to see his foot slithering into the space between my feet. My presence was entirely irrelevant to his dance.
2.
I read an essay about Gaza in The New Yorker this week. Sitting at my kitchen table, I had to take several breaks as I read. I would lay my gaze on the fruit bowl beside me, then toggle back to the story. A photograph by Fatima Shbair showed a young medic in Gaza carrying “a victim” of an airstrike. The victim was a baby. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I thought the baby must still be alive, the way the medic cradled her. But I kept looking because it wasn’t right. The baby was so gray and limp, and there was no blood. I started drawing the medic and the baby.
I rendered what Fatima Shbair had directed my attention to. I drew the perfect tender roundness of the medic’s ear, looped in his mask. I drew his backswept and gelled hair, thinking of him fixing it in the mirror that morning, the ordinariness of his fingers in that task, that would later hook under the strap of a gray baby’s overalls. I drew the baby’s loose curls, all sorts of debris fetched up in her hair, like she’d just been playing in a leaf pile. There was no blood, but there was an area on the right side of her head that looked strange, and there were a few strands of hair that hung lank and wetly down from there. The medic cradled her as if she were alive, and so I hoped. But I remembered that we don’t carry our dead differently because they’re dead. It’s not like he’d have been dangling her by her ankle. He made a frame of his arms, his elbow and wrist articulated into mitered corners around her. Her limbs were baby plump at the joints, inarticulate. The knuckles, dimples instead of bony rises, the wrists indistinct.
I drew the fruit bowl too. A million miles away from Gaza on my kitchen counter in New Hampshire. Avocados, apples, and bananas from up and down the Americas. Three bananas bunched together, and I drew the bent wrist where they connected and knuckled over.
The photo of the medic and the baby straddled the fold in the print edition of the magazine, so I did not immediately notice the other figure there. Pressing it flat, I could see her, a girl in skinny jeans and a brown t-shirt, staring at the baby with her hands pressed to her cheeks in an almost cartoon expression of shock. It looked like she was holding her own head together, split as it was by the crease between pages.
On Fatima Shbair’s Instagram page, the caption on this photo reads “A Palestinian girl reacts as a child is carried from the rubble of a building after an airstrike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip.” A redirect in my attention. A frameshift from medic to girl, though still, no one says that for sure the baby is dead.
I read another story, about the October 7th Hamas attacks. I can’t shake the one about a thirteen year old Israeli boy who went out for a morning run, and came home to find his whole family slaughtered. Where would he even have begun to lay his eyes, to take that in? How could he frame that, in those first moments when your brain cannot understand what it is seeing?
There was another story, of a man whose wife and three children were taken hostage into Gaza. He was in a refugee camp, waiting for any news. How do you frame that? Does your mind toggle between possible realities? They’re all alive; they’re all dead; some are alive and some are dead. You cannot go find them. Your spirit is frantic, charging and plunging, but your body is stalled, boxed up, stabled, with nothing to do. If they’re all dead, they are beyond suffering and there is no urgency. If any of them are still living, there is nothing as urgent as this in the entire world.
3.
When my elder son was seven months old, we left him with my in-laws so we could go away for a weekend. I don’t remember if I missed him terribly during the trip. I do remember that when we came back, and I saw him, the whole world narrowed to his face. My vision tunneled, and I can’t even tell you who was holding him when I closed the distance to scoop him up. It still happens sometimes. I was out for a run a couple weeks ago and passed him, now sixteen, running with his cross country teammates. I was vaguely aware of the other boys, but they blurred into a cluster of bobbing heads around my son’s shining self. There is nothing so beautiful as watching these three-quarter-grown children of mine out in the world.
4.
Henry Taylor has a painting called “i’m yours.” I was reading about it in an article that describes it like this:
Almost half of the canvas is dedicated to Taylor’s face. His son’s is tinier, and his daughter’s presence in the upper left corner seems like an afterthought, which, according to Taylor, it was.
The painting is even funnier than that suggests, though. His daughter looks furtive, surreptitious, like she crept into the frame doing the painting version of a photobomb, and tricked her father into painting her by pretending to be a potted plant. It cracks me up every time I look at it.
I looked up where the painting normally lives, which is at the ICA Boston. In their write up about it, I was astonished to read this:
Each stares straight ahead, meeting the eyes of the viewer with a penetrating gaze. They convey a sense of resolve and solidarity.
Solidarity? He threw her in as an afterthought! And she’s not “staring straight ahead” but is in fact giving heavy side eye.
Even more incredibly, the ICA text goes on to say,
Taylor’s painting is an important and timely addition as it diversifies these holdings by introducing an image of African-American male subjects.
His daughter is a male subject? Or does she just literally not matter? An embarrassing mistake/misgendering, it seems, but she was, admittedly, an afterthought, crammed into the frame, and anyway it supports the idea that his daughter may as well be a potted plant, textually erased in this “image of African-American male subjects.”
In the New Yorker article about the painting, Jackson Arn goes on,
The two small portraits are as slapdash as the self-portrait is lushly layered; you could stare at Taylor’s face for an hour and still find new colors, and his own stare seems too deep and too hungry to be satisfied. This may strike you as a little impolite—aren’t parents supposed to lavish more attention on their kids than on themselves?— but, then, art has no obligation to behave itself. There are no purely moral ways of looking, nor purely immoral ones. There is only looking, and the artists who do it because they’d rather die than not.
I grant the basic premise of Arn’s point—that parents are expected to be self-sacrificing. But he misunderstands the shifting project over time. Taylor’s children are not babies. They are big enough to be out in the world. As kids grow up, they differentiate from us. We know them less well, in a lot of ways. I find my teenage sons a bit inscrutable. Sometimes, they seem only lightly sketched in my understanding, not like the intimacy of their infancy or toddlerhood. There is a freedom that comes with this distancing—a chance to come up for air and scrutinize yourself as a person, not only a parent. Parents of teenagers, or of adults, by rights get to pay more attention to themselves, lavish it on themselves, paint themselves in luxuriant layers of pigment. After all, the kids need to live their own lives. I see this in Taylor’s careful attention to himself. There’s also a feeling of challenge in his painting, of “if you want to get to these precious bodies behind me, you’ll have to go through me first.” But those precious bodies recede. Taylor knows, of course, that he cannot protect these Black children. Even if he would lay down his life for them, the forces of destruction in this country would not be interested in what he offered in trade, and would annihilate them anyway, if they choose.
5.
I was texting with a friend this week, and she asked how I was. I said I felt like I’d been in a car accident—not physically harmed, but shaken. My eyeballs jolting around in my eye sockets, my skin shorting out with intermittent electric shocks at every sound, or at nothing at all. She said yes, her too, like there’d been a traumatic event, “but where’s the trauma?” She and I have both been through plenty of rough stuff in recent years, to be sure, but still, this feeling is acute, pervasive, severe.
I was thinking about that while I sat at my pleasant kitchen table, with the fruit bowl, and some flowers I’d just bought, and a cup of tea. “Nothing terrible is happening to me,” I said inside my skull. The jolted, jangled feeling in my nervous system seemed unjustified. Then, shifting the frame a little, to include not just the fruit bowl, the flowers, the cup of tea, but also the magazine, open to the photo, and also my drawing of the photo. Also the time spent bending my attention into the shape of a very young man holding a probably dead child. I cannot get tens of thousands of these individual tragedies into the frame at once, but I collect many of them as I read the news: a basement in Ukraine; a safe room in a house on a kibbutz; a bowling alley in Lewiston. The phrase: “suitable for framing.” The idea that most images, photos, little attempts at artwork, are not up to snuff, are allowed to pass by and be forgotten, but that some you will want to hang onto, fix, frame, keep. Inside my head, this gallery — all these images deemed suitable for framing, all here, fixed, kept. No wonder, walking loops in this bleak museum, my psyche jitters and quails. I am ill-suited, in such a state, to go about my normal business. I can be forgiven for choking on grief while browsing the clearance bath mats at HomeGoods.
“War is not healthy for children and other living things”.St. Corita created a poster with these words during the Vietnam War. I hung it in my dorm room. It comes into my mind everyday now for over a year.