“2205”
18″ h x 14″ w, gouache on canvas (signed, unique) (2024)
Lucy Litter is an outstandingly talented emerging artist who is currently a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. She also happens to be my cousin, and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her grow as an artist since she was a kid. When she got into her dream school of RISD, I asked if I could celebrate the occasion by commissioning a painting from her.
You may have noticed that many of the pieces in my collection are tied to places we’ve lived — for example, Todd Miller and Minneapolis, or Tobin Floom and Kristine Kordell for Portland. One location that was not yet represented was the Bay Area, where Jill and I resided for over six years during graduate school. This dovetailed perfectly with Lucy, who was a born and raised San Franciscan about to leave for college, and so I asked her to create something that represented her as an artist while also being tied to her and our (former) home.
2205 is a depiction of a transitional moment, “based on the feeling of waiting on something that you don’t quite understand yet.” It combines the melancholy of leaving behind someplace meaningful with the hopefulness of starting someplace new. I’d apply one of my very favorite and underrated words: saudade, a term which evokes the melancholic or nostalgic longing for something beloved that one has become separated from, possibly permanently. As the saying goes, “you can’t go home again,” and while of course we can literally return to a particular city or street or block, the particular anticipatory moment of leaving behind one’s childhood and stepping forward into the exhilarating and terrifying wider world — even (or especially!) at one’s dream school, in pursuit of one’s dream vocation — is a sensation one will always remember yet can never fully recover.
On a more artistic level, one element I really appreciate about this painting is how it plays with different levels of detail. There are areas of tremendous technical detail (the face, the vintage signs), but there are other portions that are rendered more impressionistically (the flowers, the roof tiles), and still others that are nearly flat (the red wall of the left building). Having these different layers makes the image feel very intentional in how it generates its mood — one can almost deconstruct with one’s eyes the different “blocks” of the painting, which evoke different levels of the underlying memory. When one tries to return to a meaningful moment of the past, there will always be particular details that are extraordinarily vivid while others are, while by no means irrelevant, more abstracted or conceptual — a “supporting cast” for the main event. The decision to not depict everything at the maximum level of realism is, for me, a marker of a creator mature beyond her years: a less talented artist couldn’t do the technical aspects at all; a less confident artist would feel pressured to show off all her technical skills in every inch of the painting. The mixed levels of detail are, for me, far more interesting than either something wholly abstract or something hyper-realistic.
David Schraub 