As I’ve said, Jacqueline and I spent a few hours talking over tea. By the time of our first visit, I hadn’t taken any photographs in her stunning Tribeca apartment, where there is a dividing wall between paints and papers. She’s kept her late husband’s office exactly as it was. On the opposite side of her studio, is one of another kind. Thousands of books, newspapers, and magazines compile. It is a library worthy of a card.
And I didn’t take any notes either. We only spoke. Though I felt I could have written the article I subsequently published only from memory of the conversation. In a sense, I have.
Still, Storage, the gallery who represents the artist, hosted two talks where I was able to scribble some citations. They were enlightening as much as they were assuring. Information continued to build onto the idea. I’ve scraped some of it out, but there’s more I have to say. What else is new?
Jacqueline showed me the binder she keeps with written details of all the cloud paintings: dimensions, brief sketches, sometimes even an opinion on if it was “good” or “not good.” Like Constable, but not. A cartographer, this is where I found the word “documenter.”
There are other bodies of work I saw in the studio, both “abstract” and architectural. Someone asks if she approaches each of them differently. Never painting just one surface at a time, she goes as far as she can in one before moving into another, placing her in a fresh perspective to return differently to the place where she once was, similar but never the same. One never steps in the same river twice.
A man I used to know once complimented my earrings, about how beautiful the little details were. He redacted the completion of the statement. “You’re more than just your details,” something along those lines. “You’re a whole picture.” I don’t remember the exact words, just the sentiment behind them. How much of a whole is its parts?
It’s maybe better I don’t remember. There is value in what I do and how. I remember Jacqueline mentioning her husband’s proclivity for words, and her retelling of his pictorial jealousy, something I confess I felt with the person who said this to me. She tells a story of him coming on the other side of the wall into the studio one day, speaking his envy. “You can see the whole painting at once,” he said to her. This is not the same with writing. Turning pages is tiring. What is one book when there’s a library behind it? How many words make up a sentence, a feeling, and a life?
Clouds only form in collections. A part is just a particle—imperceptible. They are seen only as far as they are joined together. One is another. There’s all this writing that keeps building the an ouvre. Smells collide with sight, sound, and color. Is this not just another collage?
Some photographs I wound up taking in another afterword:
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