The Artist’s Frame

I confess.

This little fellow’s been framed.

Not in the sense in which that characterization is made in my line of work, but in many other ways. Framed so he seems to pop out in bas-relief against a cloudless powder blue sky. His vivid, sharp-edged wintry colors seem to propel him towards the viewer as he bows away from a filmy floral bokeh. On closer inspection, one frond has broken clean through at its elbow: another hint of the season.

He’s frozen in time and space by a rectangle of sky so constrictive that he appears to be craning against and breaking free of its confines. Looking inquisitively down and out of the frame in which he was forever captured.

Only I can tell you who was on tip-toes on a Maine oceanside path on that long-ago morning. Chin tilted up to return this wee Flying Wallenda’s side-eyed glance as he balanced on a crimson frond.

My fingers were so cold they felt welded to my camera. My winter shots tend to be far sparer than the unending rectangular frames which entomb other seasons’ scenes.

In every season, each image’s framing allows viewers to fill in the blanks, based on contextual clues. These may be as concrete as deducing the months in which a given bloom is likely to erupt and flourish in New England. Or as abstract as interpreting a wavering pattern reflected in slightly rippled water on a cloudless day.

Strangely, I’ve written about absent lens artists’ frames more than once before:

Both within and outside the frames [my husband] Jim created each time he sparingly clicked his camera’s shutter, there was love. This was not anthropomorphism–although the scene as female frigates gathered around a scarlet-throated male echoed what I understand to be the premise of a reality show involving the distribution of a limited number of roses.

Inside each frame is something Jim loved and preserved about his window on this world: its brilliant colors and creatures, plants and geological formations, and the spectacular beauty of sights he had never seen before and never would again–at least from this earthly vantage point–on all that grows and erodes and decays and grows again around us.

On the other side of the lens was a man relishing everything about a trip he knew would be his last, with the family he loved and will forever love him. Each of his photos can transport us back to the warmth of that sun, the sounds of sea lions, the feeling of being able to reach out and touch his arm or the back of his shirt as he found himself among winged and earthbound creatures near the end of the visible world and his time in it.

The artist’s frame allows the viewer to recapture the world it holds. It also allows us to see the artist outside of each preserved moment, whether capturing something real or imagined, aspirational, or merely magical . . . .

Art travels in time, sometimes even more readily than we do.

The Company of Ghosts

My winter bird, like my husband’s winter dove and frigates in another hemisphere, surely is long gone in traditional corporeal (and photographable) form. Parca’s creaking scissors have been wielded mercilessly since then. Glorious flighted birds are now pining for the fjords. They’re off the twig, having joined “the bleedin’ choir invisible.”

But he’s also still framed here for you to see and imagine this once present soul, engaging with another being on an icy winter morning.

In the penultimate scene of a five-season show centered on a family mortuary (avert your eyes if you don’t want a spoiler), an artistic daughter takes a photo of older family members seeing her off as she leaves home for the opposite coast. She is a true photographer, and is deliberate in what she seeks to capture in each frame.

Her older brother appears at her side, from his side of the veil, and gently tells her: “You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.”

And it is.

But it’s also still with her, and anyone who truly studies the way she filled her frame.