I’ve always thought of asymmetry as unstable, and occasionally unsettling. Slightly to dizzyingly off-kilter, like the horizon in an unadjusted quick shot with frozen fingers in sub-zero air. The opposite of symmetrical.
I’m reconsidering that in light of an invitation to consider asymmetry not as imbalanced, but as a different and more complicated kind of balance: “two differing sides that balance each other out.”
Not unlike a second reader, or compatible beagles, or a loving marriage. Asymmetry that brings out the best in both sides.
I may look past a vaguely queasy horizon line, and instead focus on a rocky outcropping turned midnight black to set off a riotously colorful sunrise. The opaque velvet that complements jewels, deepening their use of light to enhance their dazzlingly reflected and refracted cores.
Beneficent balance.
We may find glorious asymmetry over time and space, too–wherever the living and breathing now walk or touch down along (or grow nearby) the paths of beings who occupied them in the sometimes very distant past.
Sometimes the balance shifts. The past is restored or renewed and the present fades by shades into the background.
Old Ironsides, rebuilt and docked in Boston Harbor, where the setting sun blankets the city skyline it obscures. An ancient Spanish Galleon docked within a cobblestone’s throw of a Starbucks housed in an old Captain’s House on Massachusetts’ North Shore. A 19th Century carved Eagle freshened with gold leaf overlooking 21st Century Halloween crowds in Salem. Modern wares for sale in an ancient markets in Fez and Marrakesh. Winding Torii gates in Kyoto, where tourists look up into ancient bamboo forests that seem to converge at a point miles above them.
A single image may involve quite a few balancing acts. Day melting into night. Blazing and muted colors, both reducing to black. Budding and emptying, upright and bowed, fall and winter.
Past and present.
Mountain trials echoing with once-solid weighted steps are now carried with us as we climb alone.
A façade sometimes bears little relationship to what, or whom, you will find beyond it.
(As has been underscored to me by more than one bitterly divorced friend, what you expect from what’s on display is not necessarily what you will find.)
I come from a generation of buttoned-up New Englanders and introverted first-generation Brooklyners. Putting aside childhood theatrics and the professional behavior necessitated in criminal courtrooms and other adversary situations, we tend to be back-benchers in social settings. We’re not temperamentally inclined towards public displays of any kind. I may be a lioness in court, but dissolve in tears when I am alone, missing people I love.
We’re more Eames than Baroque. My mother’s collages and paintings used clean lines and empty faces which viewers are free to fill in. My late husband filled a Federalist home with a truth-in-advertising interior of hand-hewn pine furniture that was Quaker-like in its simplicity. I moved from there to a much tinier Victorian house and outfitted it in mid-century Danish Modern. (It was, as they ironically say, a look.)
I leave the most raucous visual displays to nature. As one must.
Between sunrise and sunset displays, I see nature showing off all around me. A Maple leaf crushed underfoot, transformed into an ascending dove A single bird perched in Jaiselmer, like its tethered twin in the exquisite miniature painting that hung on display in a New York Museum gallery in The Goldfinch.
I’ve realized only in reflecting about what I choose to exhibit that the photos which adorn my desk and wall are of discrete displays. Every day, I look at the series of black and white portraits arrayed at my eye level and see my children on the day my husband coaxed them into posing for a Mother’s Day gift. I feel my heart settle every time I see their faces, carrying me back to the old yellow house my husband loved when we were a family of six (not counting the beagles and their own occasionally unfortunate mischievous displays). When my husband was alive and we had no inkling anything was amiss.
Nature continuously launches and reformulates its own displays. The outdoor photos my husband took and I’ve framed are of colorful performances among living creatures in their prime: a male frigate’s stunning (and successful) performance before a rapt audience of potential partners; scarlet macaws’ mating dance; magnificently armored molting reptiles making their rounds. A voguing sea lion. An icy silver heart lit by moonlight and delivered by high tide, displayed like a crown jewel on a black velvet beach in Iceland.
From the air, it seems like the Blue Planet itself is on display. Closer in, I’ve been struck by displays left by unseen human hands. Installation art in Boston and New York City. Wares and murals in Morocco. A single flower displayed against a silver New Hampshire pond. Birds positioning themselves within algae-slicked pier frames in Boston Harbor. A gathering storm beginning to show itself inland.
As with all art, capturing a display from whatever space I occupy in the world, and being able to share it, is both the privilege and essence of photography.
Anyone who knows me understands that I consider ordinary cooking regalia– and sometimes food itself–primarily for its artistry and sentimental value. So while I was delighted to come across this colorful cutlery display in a Marrakesh souk, I did not sample any of the food or drink. (At least two fellow travelers did, and came deeply to regret it.)
Like my mother, I find colorful kitchen kitsch irresistible. I have a bat-shaped bottle opener, Los Pollos Hermanos glassware, neon lime spaghetti tongs shaped like a Simpsons alien, and the pièce de résistance: my brother’s gift of a trivet shaped like a chalk outline at a crime scene.
He gets me.
I have painted many kitchen items that rarely–and sometimes never–have been used to hold food, but have traveled with me from sparsely-used kitchen to kitchen. These include birthday plates for my children, and a platter I made for my stargazing husband when we moved into the home of his dreams. And a bowl I painted for him one Christmas, when his whispers were not so distant. I adorned it with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words: “The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea; Off shot the spectre-bark.”
And while authentic fruits and vegetables rarely meet their fates in my own kitchen space, I always find room there to memorialize them in fabric, in eternal perfect bloom.
I married into a family in which the kitchen was, and remains, a hub of family and love. And food. So much food.
As our children grew, we would gather almost every Sunday with three of my husband’s sisters’ families at their parents’ house for holidays, walks to playgrounds, games and conversation and feasts.
Each of more than a dozen grandchildren had favorite hors d’ouevres and main dishes and desserts, and their Grandma Jackie tirelessly made their culinary dreams come true. She even drafted for me two favorite family recipes that I eventually was able to execute myself without structural kitchen disaster or serious medical repercussions.
Tables continue literally to groan on a daily basis in my sisters-in-laws’ homes. Although my husband mightily manned the grill when weather allowed, our own assorted refrigerators largely became backdrops for kitschy magnets which held our children’s artwork. (I wonder if it is a coincidence that he eventually decided to get a refrigerator with a paneled door that was impervious to my random decorative explosions.)
I grew up in very different spaces, where kitchens came with the apartment or home, tastes were picky and internally inconsistent, and family meals were rare. There could not have been a more stark contrast between bounty and frugality than the space between my husband’s and my views of food and its preparation and consumption. Stylistically, it was like Quaker versus Baroque.
My father had a habit, which I hope was unique, of combining disparate things he found while staring at cabinet shelves and presumably thinking about entropy. He had grown up making due with what he had and wasting nothing. The dregs of an ancient gin bottle would find themselves mixed with equally world-weary vodka, perhaps in quixotic hope that they might merge into something palatable, or at least non-injurious if eventually consumed.
His peculiar kitchen habits may have informed a phase in which my children vied for bragging rights in contests involving decoratively consolidating leftovers.
This is a roundabout way of saying that my richest kitchen memories only rarely involve food, and always link to other senses. My mind has convinced me that nothing ever tasted as sublimely delicious as the August tomatoes my mother brought from a nearby farm when I was recovering after my first son’s birth. Or the dense quadruple-chocolate cake my father-in-law brought after my first daughter’s winter birth, when I sat with her and her brothers in the irreplacable warmth of our first house’s woodstove.
I still have a coffee mug bought during our honeymoon in Quebec, which has been safeguarded from kitchen use and has not changed at all during the intervening decades. I wish I had taken a picture of the tall ceramic mugs I no longer have, handpainted with swirls of autumnal green and gold. They were in a coffee shop in Perkins Cove that now has gone missing, too. The set was the next-to-last corporeal gift my husband gave me. In my first detective novel, it was no coincidence that my grieving heroine was undone when she dropped its doppelgänger: she “closed her fingers into a white-knuckled fist over the corpus of its only remaining large shard, with its tauntingly intact handle. The rim from which [her husband] had sipped just months earlier was gone, gone away.”
No treasured household gift stands, or falls, alone.
Love in the Spaces 