Excerpts from Corona/Crown

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1. Pandemic

This is what I learned when the pandemic struck, when I couldn’t stop thinking about the artwork in all the museums, bereft of human eyes. Didn’t sculpture require adoration? Wasn’t the stone diminished by solitude? How could the art be comforted without my humming frequency? The lines, the sweet curves. The way light hits the surfaces of a face and slides to one side, or pools at the collarbone. Once, as a young girl, I took a museum tour for the blind with my grandfather. I loved the curator’s descriptions of the smallest details of each painting, the feel of the colors—how he saw beyond my mere powers of sight. But the best part was the sculpture. We were given thin white gloves and allowed to touch, to feel the exact places the artist’s hands had carved or smoothed. I closed my eyes. Reaching back in time, I could feel it: I grasped the artist’s hands, becoming part of his process, part of his love.

2. Cloud Study by John Constable

Part of his process, part of his love: this obsession. What draws you first is the size. This study of sky, no wider than your outstretched palm, is magnetic. Yet the clouds pull apart as you draw near, into mere whispers of color. There is no pure white, but layers upon layers: even the brightest portion contains grey and blue and yellow. One part of the canvas draws your eye: a pale blossom of pink. Up close you can see the brush strokes, see texture. So you start to dance—a few steps forward, a few steps back—to see the image coalesce, then separate. There’s a lesson here. It doesn’t take you long to realize this painting is trying to teach you something of the nature of intimacy: to truly understand your beloved, you need both types of seeing. And need, as well, a third thing: a letting go. To allow yourself permission to get lost, from time to time, to be immersed, so you become her. Make yourself small. Pull in your edges, your ragged edges. Only by adapting can you fit into the frame. Once you learn that lesson, your reward is infinite.

3. Black Chord by Louise Nevelson

Your reward is infinite in those rare moments when desire and coincidence collide. When the space you need to fill and the wood scraps you pick out of the trash coalesce. So much junk to one owner—the broken, the misaligned, the unloved. So full of yearning to the artist. A stranger here, but made at home. Arranged inside a grid of rectangular crates, adapted to fit into the frame: the curve of a table leg, the orbs of a balustrade, the half moon of a chair seat. Something like the neck of a violin, something like a vase. The movement of the lathe, the scroll saw, the wooden verticals against the horizontals. The tension of opposites. Unified by matte black paint as lush as napped velvet. Towering like a monument, the sculpture sucks me up, into her process. I weave in, dart out—I become shadow, clever as a crow, lucky as a magpie. Complex and agglutinated. Corrugating as I angle through a series of obstacles.