This past Saturday I was standing beside a gurney. Across from us stood a tall woman, Arabic ancestry. She wore a baseball shirt with three quarter sleeves. A grad student with particular poise, she spoke to this cluster of parents and prospective students, asking questions in the way that one does when you know the answers. She had one of those lightly hooked noses I’ve always wanted. Carefully she removed the sheet from the cadaver lying before us. Our human subject was sinewy, liver-coloured; the texture of a sundried tomato. My body contracted as she lifted the prosected rib cage, revealing a mass of lifeless organs. Gently she reached in and scooped a human lung into my husband’
In the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of the continent, I take my pen and wonder on paper if it is reasonable to spend your entire life wiping counters, moving laundry, and painting pictures of random objects. I fear that my own habits, while hugely satisfying to me, are, by any objective measure, repetitive and dull. Giorgio Morandi’s(1890-1964) paintings of subtly coloured pots come to mind. While the art world was bubbling with abstraction, Giorgio Morandi led a quiet life, painting representational subject matter.He spent his days teaching art. Every night he came home to paint the same ceramic pots. Morandi lived his entire life in the same house with his th
