On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

On Portraiture 

 

The twenty-three-year-old in the portrait hanging on my hallway wall is I. She is I forty-three years ago. My friend Jan drew this picture in her cramped dorm room when we were graduate students studying art in New York City, where I still live. Jan’s room was a dark womb hemmed in by brick walls; it faced an inner courtyard. That same dorm was my home at the time, too, but my little room, its narrow cot, and small white sink were on the fourth floor. My room looked west onto the Hudson River and General Grant’s Tomb with its classical dome and circle of Ionic columns, as well as the simpler Doric columns on the mausoleum’s front porch. It also looked onto Riverside Park and dramatic sunsets.

But beauty does not always bring comfort or consolation. My skin sizzled in the afternoons’ western light. My loneliness swelled despite the uplifting view.

Too sensitive and shy, I was a mostly a loner at that time, not knowing exactly how to befriend others, but often waiting for others to befriend me. Wasn’t it Jan, after all, who knocked on my painting studio door one evening in 1979, when we were both new to Columbia University’s MFA program? When I opened the door, I saw her face shine in the fluorescent institutional lighting. Her lips in a half grin, she held out, toward me, a wool cap turned upside down forming a soft bowl. In it was a gift, a joint strategically hidden: a contraband offering of friendship.

She and I bonded quickly despite my timidity. Still, every Saturday afternoon, I would take solitary walks along 57^th Street to look at art in blue chip galleries, the sky always seeming gray and sterile. My captivation with the art I saw did not soften my aloneness.

In the drawing Jan drew all those years ago, the young woman who is I is stern, but also fragile and pensive. Her mouth — my mouth — almost in a frown, is brooding, the eyes staring uneasily. Perhaps she is wondering if this portrait would foreshadow her destiny, predict a solemn future. I imagine her hands; they are splotchy with paint — cerulean, yellow ochre, crimson. The colors seem never to wash off. And she is gazing downward, beyond the borders of the picture’s frame.

Is she looking for her childhood? Is she looking for the Toronto suburbs where her parents settled after the Second World War to live among other Holocaust survivors? I’m sure she thinks she’s disappointed them, veered off far from the expectations they brought to Canada from their shtetls: among them, women got married and had children. The day Jan drew this portrait — my portrait — I had spread pieces of knotty pine on the floor of my studio in Harlem. I had hammered the pine into stretchers, over which I pulled and stapled swaths of canvas for paintings, my fingers calloused from the pulling.

In the portrait, my lips are pursed and there are dark circles under my eyes. I appear to be anxious, as if I were feeling my two different worlds colliding: the one I came from and the one I’d journeyed to. Still, I remember that folded into that evening, in Jan’s tiny room, was an intimate warmth. I must have felt safe experiencing this somber, contemplative part of myself willing to materialize on a sheet of drawing paper by means of my new friend’s fingers. Jan and her charcoal were the instruments that brought out the withdrawn person I was, secluded in her own small room, the I who regularly journeyed inward and turned sullen, who would watch rain falling hard, but avoided dazzling sunsets.

I spotted that similar kind of self — inward, reflective, glowering — yesterday in drawings and paintings on display at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. I went with a friend to see an exhibition called “Holbein: Capturing Character.” Hans Holbein the Younger, a Renaissance master, understood how to translate a person’s inward self into oil paint, chalk, and ink on paper. Five hundred years later, Jan was learning from such masters.

In one of Holbein’s meticulous drawings, the aloof and worried gaze of the 16th-century poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, as a teenager, testifies to his mischievous sullenness. His brown eyes have slightly different shapes. His right eyelid sloping downward is almost seductive and playful, resisting distress. But the left eye is serious. This pair of dissimilar eyes — was their difference the young poet’s way of letting slip, “I am sick of being only grim?” Like the gaze Jan preserved of my younger self, the Earl of Surrey’s left eye seems to state, “I have no time for humor.”

I wondered if his light-hearted right eye was almost too natural and ordinary to be closely studied. But didn’t Shakespeare say, a bit later on during the Renaissance, “Eyes are windows to the soul?” Even the Earl’s flirty right eye, then, must be a pane in a room worth contemplating, the eye intimating a soul deserving attention, which Holbein captured on a sheet of pink paper.

A work of art, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observes, one which is lasting, is “a reliable home.” If this is true, portraits may be seen as timeless rooms: human faces immortalized, made of paint, chalk, charcoal, marble, bronze. In The Human Condition, Arendt speaks of an artwork’s “outstanding permanence.” It exists, she says, as “something immortal achieved by mortal hands”: the work of a supernatural being that is carried out by a human, the spirit of the person portrayed waiting inside the physical artist’s hand to be transformed, to be set free.

Drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs of the human face have fascinated me since I was a child. Before I’d seen an actual portrait, other than faces in snapshots, many of them belonging to relatives murdered during the Holocaust, I was intrigued by the way sunlight spilling into our kitchen glazed my mother’s profile with a brightness that seemed to transform her briefly into oil paint on panel. That sunlight, I imagined, blanched, temporarily, the dimness of her anxiety and sadness. The strain and worry on her face which, when I was a little girl, I tried to will away, seemed sponged from her forehead by the sun that also spotlighted the dance in her eyes, the ecstatic spirit in them. She was still the woman who’d survived Hitler, then Stalin. Her nervousness was like an epitaph inscribed in the air above her. But the occasional joy and energy that lifted the corners of her mouth and made her cheeks pink provided an almost spiritual occasion for me. When I saw my  mother like that, I did not, for those moments, feel it necessary to conjure a secret spell on her through which to drive away her sadness.

Maybe because survivors of the Holocaust, when I was growing up, left much of their interior lives unspoken — to hush up their own memories, to protect their children — I tried to teach myself to read emotions on the human face. As if it were a reflex, I became, I thought, proficient at intuiting what was happening in a person’s interior life. My close observation of my mother’s face probably turned me into a close observer of other people’s faces. When I was young, I drew detailed portraits — of my parents, passengers on buses, friends — in my sketchbooks. The face I drew most of all was my mother’s. This was my way of keeping myself from losing her one day.

Through the way I scrutinized my mother’s face to gauge her happiness or despair, I also scrutinized the faces of other family members, friends, and even strangers to understand what was inside them. When the lighting in a room made their features appear to be rendered in what in art is called chiaroscuro, I would stare with particular curiosity. Chiaroscuro in paintings is the use of theatrical contrasts between light and dark, giving the subject volume and also mystery.

At the end of Shabbat when the sky blackened and you could count three stars in it, I would, when I was in my late teens visiting my aunt and uncle in their ancient Jerusalem apartment, watch how my uncle’s face swam mystically out of the dining room’s darkness. Lighting wicks that sprung like twigs from the braided yellow strands of the wax of a Havdalah candle, my uncle, his face in chiaroscuro would be transformed into someone I barely recognized, someone I feared who inspired terror and awe. The Havdalah ceremony which, in Judaism, marks the end of the Sabbath, and the dramatic candlelight, seemed to grant him frightening magical powers. With the braided candle, a silver goblet of wine, and a box of spices, he said blessings that pointed to the distinctions between the sacred and the everyday, light and dark.

My uncle, the hairs of his graying beard twinkling like threads of blown glass, would raise the lit candle — the first light of the new week. Each family member around the table would hold their hands up to the flame, so that they could see its glow on their fingernails. Now the coming week would be a time for creating new things. After each one of us took a sip of the wine, my uncle poured the remainder into a different cup, in which he would extinguish the candle, its light so strong the wicks hissed as they touched the wine’s surface. The magician my uncle was as his face suddenly surfaced from darkness — was he the same person who’d devoted his life to studying the Torah: a humble, simple, modest man, a survivor of the Holocaust as well?

 From an early age, I studied the faces in actual portraits. The painting which hung in my parents’ living room was of a woman wearing a crimson dress that slipped off one shoulder. One of her large hoop earrings glinted in the darkness from which three-quarters of her face emerged, liberated and glowing in light that seemed to emanate from the elaborate gold frame holding her inside the canvas. There was something demonic in her face that came across in the chiaroscuro of the painting’s rendering, I thought. Those days, I believed light and dark were symbols of what was inside a person: the good and evil that I thought I understood. But the supernatural powers I credited myself with having as a little girl, that could speer inside a person, I believe now comprised my way of relieving the sense of helplessness. It was my way of taking action, though actually I could take none. To act is to stumble, to err, to make mistakes, but my need not to disappoint turned me inward, I think, made me stern. This need hardly permitted me to act at all. The good and evil I ascribed to others — the extreme dark and light — like any aspects of one’s interior life are, now I know, less transparent than I once thought.

Nonetheless, I loved — I still love — portraits in which the artist makes use of chiaroscuro’s dramatic effects: the simultaneous otherworldliness and solid weight suggested by the striking contrasts of light and dark. Especially sharp chiaroscuro is known as tenebrism with its marked theatricality. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I would gaze in the trance state to which I am often transported by art, at paintings by Caravaggio, an artist of the 16th- and s17th-centuries known for his particularly revolutionary tenebrism. Although many of the works he painted depict violent struggles rapidly done, I became especially obsessed with a serene and meticulous painting by another painter. Influenced by Caravaggio, the painting of Georges de La Tour, the one I love, is titled “The Penitent Magdalen.”

The scene La Tour creates in which he portrays Mary Magdalen is illuminated by one candle, symbolizing the unsteady flickering of life. The darkness surrounding Mary partially defines the boundaries of her face and body. The painting is quiet, its forms simple, geometric, and calm. Here is Mary contemplating the emptiness of the world, and the transience of life and things. Our lives on earth as gradation.

The painting is a type of still life known as vanitas meant to remind the viewer of the worthlessness of earthly pleasures. Vanitas comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Having grown up among people whose families were mostly wiped out by the Nazis, I have been especially attuned to life’s fragility. In the painting, Mary’s stylized oval face is turned away from the viewer as if she is trying to erase herself, meditating about and forsaking the gratifications of the flesh, renouncing such a life for an existence of atonement. Her hands are folded over a skull, symbol of mortality. She stares not into but above a mirror in which the candle’s reflection appears. Is she accounting for the errors she has made?

Although I respect the seemingly irrefutable beliefs about good and evil, right and wrong underlying “The Penitent Magdalen,” the world’s energies and human darkness are much too complicated to permit such sure morality. It has taken me my whole life to let my mind hold the idea that what appears between the drama of light and dark — the tints, the tones, the shades — is also substantive and real. And am I doing penance these days for the oppressive absolutisms of my youth, for neglecting human tonalities?

But it is easy to feel hatred, to view others through the single-mindedness of hate’s lens. The manner, for example, in which I was inclined to pass judgement on others, quite mercilessly — was this because I felt I had to pass judgements on myself? My fear of disappointing my parents and their wounded community: I wonder now if this has given way to my extreme loves and revulsions. I remember that at age 15, I was hospitalized for stomach pain. An orderly, glancing at my face frowning in the bleached clinical light, observed, “You’re so serious.” I was quick to judge him harshly. I thought his comment was mean. But hadn’t he carefully — almost tenderly — placed my lunch onto the tray above my lap? Was the expression on my face like the one Jan captured years later? I felt hatred toward the orderly as if he had inflicted a kind of brutality, though the concerned attention he showed me while delivering my meal underscored his nuanced compassion.

Driven to study the modern state of humanity, even after World War II, Hannah Arendt, born in 1906, was a Holocaust survivor like my parents and my uncle and aunt. On the cover of The Human Condition is a black and white photo from the early 1950s of her face. The woman portrayed there seems unafraid of the solemnity that takes shelter in her probing eyes, which stare steadily into the moment. They root the portrait’s viewers to an essential part of herself: the light and dark and grays radiating from her mind like branches from a tree. Shadows dusk the right side of her face, though the right eye still gleams. The strokes of shade on her chin and neck are painterly; her wavy hair spirals upward like smoke. She is almost smiling as if she were amused, but cranes her neck to assert with conviction, “There are things I am sure of,” though her certainties are not limited to absolutes, but are more like bookends holding up a spectrum of moral nuance.

I roam along the path of her gaze. I feel her looking at me, insisting that I take action from which my panic over disappointing others has restrained me. This action shimmers. It promises to help me become more compassionate. It offers me the possibility of seeing the faces of others — as Jan saw mine in gradations of black and white — through the complexity of human subtlety because action entails a process of wandering, and “to wander” in Latin is errare: “to stray, to err.”

Action, Arendt writes, is “the human capacity … for beginning new and spontaneous processes.” It is the highest spire among the many well-built turrets and belfries that make up the human condition. She explains this idea of action was made plain by an informal remark of a scientist she once overheard who said, “Basic research is when I am doing what I don’t know what I am doing.” One of action’s prominent features is freedom, the liberty — its range like shades between light and dark—people have to accomplish something unexpected, build new homes, create new rooms, cherish new faces.

The room in which I am learning to take action now, to be, in a sense, “free,” and set loose from my harshness — this room contains objects I love to look at, that don’t reproach me when I draw and write and read. When I stumble. The teal-blue of my armchair, for instance, thrills me, comforts me into this sunlit space. I fantasize that this chair grew from a sprig watered by the sky’s periwinkle — a sky I often see through my windows. The word “teal” comes from the name of a bird, a kind of duck, whose eyes are surrounded by a small wave of this color, and my chair does have arms the shape of wings. Sometimes it has the familiarity of a womb, place of my past, of my gestation. There are days when I curl up inside it, a book open on my lap.

From my chair I can see, on the wall perpendicular to these windows, two small self-portraits I drew in pencil when I was 17. The drawing assignment that my high school art teacher gave my class was to portray something mirrored on both a concave and a convex surface. I drew my face reflected in an electric kettle and in the bowl of a soup spoon. Maybe I made the drawings one spring afternoon when the ground was still white with snow. Today as I write this, I’m wandering, sometimes floundering really, through time elongated as my face in the concave bowl of a spoon. I notice, in each self-portrait, something of the brooding, pensive self I was when Jan drew me 43 years ago; something of the teenage Henry Howard, sullen and light-hearted; and something of Arendt’s certain, but also nuanced, stare. And who will I be now, my face lined in darkness, in light, and in what falls between?