My friend Sherrod was the first artist I knew personally who made money at her craft. Which meant she covered her expenses and then some.
I remember seeing her painting on Liberty Street, where I lived in San Francisco. Victorian houses in oil. She was prolific. One night, as the sun began to go down, I invited her in for dinner. It was the first time she met my then-boyfriend/now ex-husband. Being somewhat filter-less, she named him “Pretty Boy” on the spot.
That year Pretty Boy bought me a copy of one of Sherrod’s pieces for my birthday.
It was a view of Dolores Park, from above it, and downtown San Francisco in the distance. Done in watercolors. Light. Almost cartoonish. Nothing like her other work which was darker and moody.
Pretty Boy put it in a white-wood frame he found in the alley and hung it over our bed. It followed us from San Francisco to Oakland, Chicago and Seattle – where I left it – a little piece of our first shared home.
I get emails from Sherrod now and again, telling me about her shows in the Bay Area. But I hadn’t really thought about her work much until now, standing at the Art Institute of Chicago. I am at the “Dreams & Echoes: Drawings and Sculpture in the David and Celia Hilliard Collection” exhibit – Artist Date 57.
My friend Jack suggested it.
I like the sketches in the process of becoming – Degas’ “Grand Arabesque,” Matisse’s “Still Life with Apples.” The ripe, sexy suggestiveness of Rodin’s “Leda and the Swan,” Povis de Chavannes’ “Sleeping Woman.” The eerie, ethereal quartet in Toorop’s “A Mysterious Hand Leads to Another Path.” But I don’t quite see how it all hangs together.
Francis Towne’s “Naples: A Group of Buildings Seen from an Adjacent Hillside.” An accurate, albeit not terribly inspired, title. It is from 1781, done in pen and black ink, with a brush, and black and gray wash over traces of graphite. Italy. But all I see is Dolores Park.
I am wistful and happy at the same time – remembering this place I used to call home, where the sun wasn’t a stranger in January and, rumor had it, Tracy Chapman lived on my street. This place where I met and married Pretty Boy.
It is the second time I’ve rubbed up against California today.
“Nevada Falls, Yosemite Valley, California,” painted in 1920 by Marguerite Thompson Zorach. The dreamy, translucent watercolors whisper to me of Sherrod’s Dolores Park.
I know the view. I’ve seen it many time,s driving down from Badger Pass to the Yosemite Valley floor, coming through the tunnel carved into granite. Surprising and spectacular. I’ve hiked a part of it, along with Vernal Falls and the John Muir Trail, forming a loop. I was with Pretty Boy and our friend Tim –my first foray into camping.
We stayed in Curry Village in a canvas tent cabin with a wood platform and a single light bulb. Tim threw baby carrots to the squirrels, although the signs all around instructed him not to. Hilarious – until one scurried into our tent.
We bought water and painted wood disks strung on elastic at the adjacent store. “Camp beads,” I exclaimed, handing a strand to Pretty Boy. Not unlike the ones he had given me off his own neck on our first date.
I got boot bang on the trail descending and had to rip off my toenail. And once back at Curry Village, I jumped into the Merced River, and then sat on a rock, drying and shivering in the sun.
After that trip I graduated to a real tent, the lightweight kind I could use to backpack in for a few days.
“Das Haus.” The Marc Chagall woodcut jumps from the wall. All four woodcuts, displayed in a row, do. But it is Chagall who paints my heart. Lead glasses my heart. Woodcuts my heart.
A house erupting from a man’s shoulders. According to the placard, it was produced following Chagall’s exile from Belarus. “…the work can be seen as an image of the artist metaphorically carrying his home with him.” Like the movie, Up. Like the painting in my living room, “You Can Take It With You,” that I bought from my friend Scotty before leaving Chicago in 2011.
I return to the placard at the exhibit’s entryway. It ends, “Even with its diversity of artists and time periods, the Hilliard collection possesses a remarkable consistency in sensibility: these works are unified by their ability to transport the viewer to other eras, other worlds.”
Chagall’s house. My stories. Towne’s Naples. My California.
A Wandering Jewess 