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Oh Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in, are you aware the shape I'm in...

I see your candle in the window just now - thank you, darling. I think of you, smile, remember your beautiful smile, think about what to write to you, and as I muse, a line from a lovely Avett Brothers song from the radio comes to mind.

I think of the John Koch paintings I've posted the last couple of days. You know, those particular images are remarkable - the furnishings in the apartment are configured quite like that, and you and I don't look so different from the depicted figures.

I really like that painter. I was never aware of him, but one weekend afternoon in the weeks following 9/11 D and I visited the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West. I don't recall now why we were there. In my work on a maritime history of a tiny Bronx island I had recently spent, here and there, several extremely enjoyable hours in the Society's wood-paneled (as I recall) research room, following little clues of arcana as I pieced together a history. I recall opening a jumbled file that contained, in passing, an original slip of paper with A. Burr's signature in tiny inked cursive. And I examined, laid atop a burnished library table, a rare, early, pastel-colored and copperplate-lettered map of lower Westchester that included a depiction of the diminutive fish-shaped island that was the object of my study, from the time it was part of that county.

But that's not why D and I were there that day. As it happened, in one gallery a video of one of the hijacked planes crashing into a tower was on infinite loop and when a bench became vacated I sat down, girded myself and watched. There was a city planning commissioner there too, a fulsome obnoxious self-important man seemingly presiding over the exhibit, I don't know what he was doing there. Unfortunately in the aftermath of 9/11 a strange opportunistic streak came out on the part of some municipal officials - or so I felt. I just remember him patronizingly beaming at the crowd milling past the video installation - as if he was responsible somehow for gauging our reactions? I don't know what.

I'm certain that video is not the reason D and I had made a special trip. Perhaps we had simply wandered in there in passing from somewhere else, on a beautiful autumn afternoon.

But what I do remember to this day was a ravishing exhibition, room after room, of paintings of an artist I had never heard of, John Koch, and who really, I haven't heard of since, though of course I don't travel in art circles so much. Anytime I wish to think of him I've forgotten his name and have to do awkward google searches to recollect it.

The exhibit was called John Koch: Painting a New York Life, and indeed it was canvas after exquisite, colorful, realistic canvas of scenes of his fully and richly lived life in a capacious, lightfilled Manhattan apartment, with his wife, and soaring views from their windows, and lovely furnishings, and a grand piano - so beautiful. The paintings were fairly large, as I recall - say, window size - so it was like peeping (invited) into their windows and vicariously luxuriating in sublime afforded glimpses within. I've always been drawn to scenes like that, and indeed (maybe especially in Brooklyn, because the apartment we lived in was gorgeous and in excellent repair) have tried to emulate in whatever fashion I can that way of being. Flowers on a table, happy cats, music on the stereo, the cast of golden light on the surroundings at the end of a day, a nice drink, a kiss right now for you, my darling...

Those resplendent paintings, with their quietly elegant, peaceful, beautiful subject matter, were a welcome balm at any time whatsoever, but perhaps especially in the wake of the recent destruction, ruin, wreckage, and devastation, a clear blue sky filled sunny day turned horrible. No, here was permission again to enjoy the quiet moments, the slant of light, a loved one, a harmonious domestic space, one's carefully chosen and cared for belongings...

Anyway.

Stella the Artist just came on and I caught it - oh, yeah!

Many kisses, my love.

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