PAINTINGS FROM ACROSS THE STREET
The Little Street
Despite the quiet solitude of his paintings, Vermeer had 11 children, none of whom are pictured in his work, one more piece of evidence that art is often the reprieve from one's life. Anton Chekov, who was a physician, famously said in a 1888 letter "medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress,” which sounds like mere rhetoric when you consider that Paul Gauguin actually left his family and moved to Tahiti in 1891 and began consummating with his numerous nubile subjects, their olive green skin forbidden and otherworldly.
I saw The Astronomer (c. 1668) during an ill-advised trip to Paris, for which I went utterly unprepared and in the throes of various unrequited loves, where I had as close to a mental breakdown as young man in his 20s could have. I walked along the Seine past couples imagining how remarkable my suicide would be. Exhausted from a sleepless night, I woke up in on a bench inside the Louvre to a little girl staring at a line a drool which ran down my neck. That night at the hostel a group of Irishmen invited me to go drinking and I declined, preferring to tend to an unnamed obsessive compulsive disorder.
Vermeer is someone who you really must see in person. The darkest corners of his rooms are not merely mixed, but layers upon layers of translucent glazes of pure crimson and ultramarine, such that the effect is not a tonal portrayal of darkness, but darkness itself, in that it recedes into the canvas. Instead of painting a cube black, imagine being able to look at the darkness inside.
So there I was, my face inches away from a young man looking upon a globe, a minuature known world inside his room, until being shued away by a diligent guard who was less than charmed by my enthrallment.
Vermeer only did two paintings outside, The Little Street (c. 1685) and View of Delft (c. 1661). In the former, women are occupied in humble daily activities, perhaps one of them being The Milkmaid. The shapes of the buildings carve the cloud bumpy sky, weighted somewhat awkwardly but resolved by the master.
What has interested me the most for years is the lower third of the painting. When cropped, the doorways, windows, and alley immediately gain this uncanny presence and the painting becomes about something else—the mystery beyond closed doors, the peak into open ones, the hint of secret lives behind windows. For whatever vouyerism is attributed to his work at large, my personally cropped version opens it wide.
Civilizations spawn cities, roads are flayed with livelihoods, cultures show their colors and shapes, pedestrians walk among this gathering things for their bodies and homes, ultimately irrelevant and invisible.
Unknown, riddled by financial strain, under the demands and judgement of his domineering mother-in-law, I wonder about the scene on the other side of the street that fateful day: a quiet neighborhood man suddenly appears with a small canvas, an easel, his painting box, and for no explicable reason, paints the street.
After that day, he retreats to his home and is never painting again.
Like many young people, I too was in desperate need of “finding myself” and, not immune to cliche, thought the discovery of a better me would be in Europe. Paris was the first stop to what should have been a trip through Italy to Greece. This was before smartphones and the many apps which make traveling easier. Tormented by all the intercourse all my crushes seemed to be constantly having, I impulsively showed up in the Marias district with only a reservation at a hostel for the first night. I didn’t have a credit card, maps, or contacts.
The trip was all part of a fantasy in which wake up one morning next to a French, Italian, or Greek goddess. I could image the soft zephr on my naked body, how her hair might tickle my useless nipples.
Let me argue that fantasy is the only genre in art. The fantasy of what I might find, of who I might be. The entire conceit of marking a rectangle, either by representation or the medium itself, thereby imbuing it with meaning (even a postmodern meaning-ridden void), is insanely human. The magic of recognition—to share with others something as simple as how something looks, or how marks which do not look like anything might make someone feel. I am grateful to be part of this collective fantasy, this completely obsolete yet urgent medium of painting. It’s etched in my heart, like love, or grief, this place I would rather be. Not across the ocean, but across the street ■