"Sometimes Waters Flood
Even the Most Crack Proof"
Artist: Vanessa Leal
Medium: Oil and Collage on Masonite
Date: 2003

Sometimes waters flood
even the most crack proof
it wasn't enough to just hold you
it wasn't enough period
I wasn't enough

It is easy at times to get away from the art. I feel that lately I have allowed the artist to supercede the piece in my view. Not that the artists aren't fascinating, but their stories only overlap somewhat with that of the piece. The artwork does indeed have a life independent of the artist, for what viewer really knows anything about its creator even when she sees the bio on the museum wall? And so, an experiment: a description of only one piece during the time taken to consume one mug of artfully made coffee, chocolate, milk and cream at Nina's Cafe.

The piece I am sitting near is beautiful, but not in a conventional manner. This painting does not have the smooth, polished, "licked" surface of eighteenth-century masterpieces, nor does it contain a recognizable subject. To start with the very basics, it is roughly four feet tall by two feet wide, displayed proudly with its sisters on a white wall near the large window that overlooks Selby Avenue. The tattered gold leaf near the center sparkles from across the room, distorting in its glare an immediate view of the rest of the painting. As I approach it, move around it, carefully balancing my mocha, my eyes pick out the more details.

A pair of thin, brown, naked arms encircles the patch of gold leaf, appearing with slight modeling from a loosely penciled set of shoulders and neck, which disappear off the top of the panel. A line in the neck suggests that the head may be turned slightly to my right, if I were able to see it. Perhaps the face would be quiet, pensive, delicate, distracted. The arms terminate in fidgeting hands, long and bony, softly touching fingertips together at though for comfort or reassurance. There is a penciled band about the middle finger of the left hand, almost an echo; maybe that ring is only a memory. Its presence has vanished, but not its meaning.

A few more traces of gold leaf, barely noticeable against the warm oranges and yellows of the inner spaces of the panel, trickle down from the tender fingers. The bottom of the panel is awash in a white and grey cloud of paint, rising up to conceal the fiery hues. It creeps up the right side of the painting, reaching around the arms and into the emptiness of the shoulders and neck. Perhaps that hollow embrace has resolved itself against all odds, or perhaps it is simply the last to fade away.

Below and to the left, bracing itself between the solid arms and tenuous mist, is a patch of paper, pasted on top of the pigment, with a fragment of a poem sketched upon its surface. The opening lines are those that form the title of the piece; the rest of it you'll find above. The edges of the parchment are discolored and ragged; they rise up from the thick paint -- separate, yet joined by proximity and feeling.

The texture of the piece is marvelous. The gold leaf, attached poem and, above all, layered and cracked paint divulge a sense of age and, somehow, a certain amount of grace and timelessness. Sometime this year has been painted another "Mona Lisa." Now, don't mistake me, this is not a copy of daVinci's (infamous) piece. I really detest that painting, but it is true that Mona Lisa's agelessness has been commented on time and again. I use it here as a metaphor, a reference, a connection across art and time which may enable you to better understand the piece I am currently sitting before.

I am now down to the chocolate bottom of my mocha and it is decidedly cold. My eyes continue to trace the line from forearm to ring finger to index finger to forearm and back again. I move toward the edges of the panel and am repelled back inward by the nebulous grays. In the middle I am warm, trapped within her arms, wondering at the eternal nature of love and the so-called human condition. Soon I will hop off this chair, stretch, and walk home through the chill September air. I am not necessarily smarter or wiser, but nonetheless contain one more piece, which I may eventually use to understand my own life, love, and emptiness