Closet Paintings

A mostly hidden blog by Mechanical Grace.

When I was 8 or 9 I did a messy, free-form painting, the type that starts with beautiful colors but ends up a brownish tragedy. Still, small flashes of color remained. When I looked at the abstract mess after it had dried, I noticed a tiny shape that looked remarkably, precisely, like a small house, perched on a ledge. Suddenly the chaotic whorls became a cliff face, balancing this little house, and the grayish yellow strip across the top of the page, an odd-colored sky. Looking more carefully I found people, other little buildings, a horse. I marveled at having created such an objective reality, not because it was an accident-- on the contrary, I tried to forget that-- but rather because it seemed such an accomplishment to have achieved that impossible magic, verisimilitude. I kept the painting in the closet and would look at it in private, feeling unreasonably proud, and engrossed in the story I'd hidden in my own painting. I never expected anyone else to see the things I saw, and I still don't, but I work more intentionally now, so you never know...

June 6

48. What’s Left Here?

One of many reasons I love fossils is because each one is a long shot, a small miracle of probability (or, to look at it another way, a measure of just how vast time is, that the world is filled with rarities, but that’s a consideration for another day). The fossil represents something ephemeral: animal or plant matter that would otherwise decay over the course of decades but which, for reasons of chance, instead lasts for millions of years. Because of the many ways this may happen, and the different forms and materials involved, there is always a question as to what the fossil is. Sometimes it’s a positive or negative rock mold of an object, and sometimes it is the actual cellular materials, replaced by minerals in a correlation so specific as to preserve internal structures of a plant or animal.

So, what is it you’ve really got there? Bone or wood (or even dung) turned to rock? A leaf imprint? Or something trickier to wrap your mind around, like an internal structure of some soft invertebrate, or even the filled shape of some body cavity?

Fossils could hardly be richer metaphorical finds, either. Lately I’ve been thinking of friendships this way, as artifacts of chance: someone who by dint of circumstance should have been a fleeting acquaintance, for example, can find their way into your life permanently under the right conditions. The variety of time and events will have its effects: you may know someone to the grave, or if after, say, a few years, the connection is lost, the traces in your life may still always be there. Sometimes— often, really— the connection itself may remain but change: passion can cool, in the process hardening, like steel, into immutable devotion; or eternities of gaze and touch may suddenly be replaced, due to circumstance, by occasional words from afar, so that the sense of the connection remains but is rendered crude, fuzzy or broken. In those cases, the tricky questions return: just what is left here? What do I have, really?

I’ve been facing a lot of those questions in the past three or four years.

I suppose it helps, then, to remember another thing about fossils: each one can be considered a gift, a precious piece of the past brought, through magnanimous luck, into the present, into your life. For the time being at least, holding onto it may be more important than fully understanding it.