The Absent Hand by Suzannah Lessard

Author:Suzannah Lessard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092228
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

5

Fresh Kills

One mellow winter day during my Brooklyn sojourn, just before Christmas, I set off for Red Hook with a portable easel. I like to produce a nice painting, but as an amateur my main reason for painting is to see. I am forever surprised by what I hadn’t seen until I painted it. Red Hook was once synonymous with danger. But now the Invasion of the City Snatchers was taking over even Red Hook. In fact, with its views of Manhattan and the harbor it was becoming romantic. Still, in the 1990s, some parts were iffy. But I wanted the view of Manhattan across Governors Island. The portable easel and paints were heavy: I went by car. It was already two-thirty by the time I got there, nearly sundown at that time of year. But I found the spot I had scouted, next to a Snapple factory. Three chest-high blocks of concrete would give me the view, and soon I was up on one of them, teetering a bit, figuring out all over again how to unfold that doohickey of an easel and get it to straddle the blocks with its spidery legs.

From up there I could see over chain link topped with spiraling superbarbs, across Governors Island, with its brick neo-Georgian buildings among sere oaks, to overweening Wall Street rising behind. I painted against time, just going over the falls of the project pell-mell. If you think landscape painting is a peaceful occupation just because the product can be, you are mistaken. It’s a hair-raising pursuit. Around three-thirty a young man showed up with a boom box and I thought, “Hmmnnn,” because of Red Hook’s old reputation, and there I was, a woman and the sun going down. But that was an old geography of danger speaking, and I wanted to finish my painting; and, anyway, something told me I was okay. It turned out he was there to wash the little school-bus shuttles that Snapple provided for employees between the factory and the subway. The music on the boom box was religious rap. We worked together.

To my eye, Governors Island and the skyscrapers of Wall Street behind it were different in scale in a way that needed puzzling out. That was why I had chosen the site. But what I hadn’t foreseen and what emerged as a problem on the canvas was the relationship of the two towers of the World Trade Center, proportionally speaking, to old Wall Street. Even though they were on the far side of Manhattan, and thus diminished in size by distance, they were double the height of any other tower in my painting. While scouting, I just hadn’t seen this. The reason, I think, was that I was so used to them, that even though they always seemed too big I’d learned not to notice how big. As tackled by brush in hand, they also seemed physically awkward, perhaps partially because of outrageous disproportion. But symbolic dissonance contributed. The towers were designed

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