Charles Haslewood Shannon The Toilette 1927 oil on canvas Usher Gallery, Lincoln |
Maurice Greiffenhagen Nude with a Wrap 1924 oil on canvas Glasgow School of Art |
attributed to Antonis Mor Portrait of a Man as St Sebastian ca. 1550 oil on panel Museums Sheffield, Yorkshire |
Juan CarreƱo de Miranda St Sebastian ca. 1650-60 oil on canvas York City Art Gallery |
William Etty Half-Length Study of a Model Viewed from the Back ca. 1835-45 oil on board Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
Henry Herbert La Thangue Study of a Model Holding a Staff ca. 1885-90 oil on canvas The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent |
Anthony van Dyck after Titian Ecce Homo ca. 1622-25 oil on paper Courtauld Gallery, London |
Green Permanent
As you told it to me – our clearest, most reflective conversations
so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into
the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings –
you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down
into your father's basement workroom to look for the right
size screws; in her wanderings, she has tugged off the front
door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine,
you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he
must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see
the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools,
the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets,
the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them
like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a
miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick
in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves,
their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and
tapered gothic towers. The room's order had been disturbed
by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing
machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts
still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes,
gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts,
the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words
in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words,
and for you they were part of your father's speech, or maybe
more like your mother's now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence.
With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes,
still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school
of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge
with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers – surfaces so smooth
and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no
choice but to understand the power of creation running through
the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around
for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked
Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes
of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both
the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.
– Jessica Greenbaum (2015)
attributed to William Hilton after Il Sodoma Christ at the Column before 1839 oil on canvas National Trust, Stourhead, Wiltshire |
Valentino Valentini after Andrea del Sarto St John the Baptist 1877 oil on canvas Guildhall Museum, Rochester, Kent |
Herbert Wilson Foster The Belgian Model ca. 1890 oil on canvas Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery |
Herbert Wilson Foster The Seated Model ca. 1890 oil on canvas Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery |
Henry Keyworth Raine Self Portrait as Diogenes ca. 1900 oil on canvas York City Art Gallery |
Keith Baynes A Miner ca. 1930 oil on canvas New College, University of Oxford |
Edward Seago The East Window ca. 1944 oil on board Norfolk Museums |
Graham Dean Rise II 1999 watercolour on paper Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull |