IMAGINE A BIG, SQUARE, WELL-LIGHTED, MESSY STUDIO with cigarette smoke hanging in the air and blending with the smell of oil paint and turpentine. A window is open to the crisp Berkeley day, and large and small canvases are stacked along the floor against the walls, some with their backs facing you, some three and four deep, one on the easel, a couple hanging on walls, and one propped on an old bookcase. Imagine them all, Daphne and Couple and Four Women and Head and Women in a Landscape and Red Bather (figs. 80, 99, 79, frontispiece, 102, and 2). Paintings like that, those very paintings, paintings all over, and there I am, one of the painter’s daughters, twenty-six, looking.
Stunned, speechless, heavy, blunted, dazed, as uncomfortable as I’d ever been, all my life wanting and trying to feel what my eyes saw, wanting to have words even just for myself, words for sorting it out and saving it. That this was my father’s work. That he did it all and it came from inside of him and it said who he was—this reality was stunning and left me speechless. Then that the paintings themselves existed and looked the way they did and had the power and depth and—what was it, magnificence?—that they had, making it unimportant who painted them so long as they existed—this was the other reality.
I stood there taking it all in while at the same time I had no way to take it in, and so I was dazed and felt blunted from the lack of—of what, of myself? Who was I, I wondered, standing there in that room with those paintings that came up from the depths of my father and down his arm and into his hand and out from the end of his paintbrush.
His hands were exactly the same size as mine. Sometimes we held them up, pressed together, thumb to thumb, fingers spread wide, and laughed about it. Did he have small hands or were mine big, I asked, and he said, no, of course not, not either. “The point is, we have great hands,” he said. And now I am in my eighties and he’s been gone fifty years, as long as he lived, and I see the paintings in my mind’s eye and I remember.
It occurs to me that during the entire process of writing this book I did not ever stop to think that I’m doing what has always been the very hardest thing for me to do—the life-difficulty of finding words to match how I feel about the paintings, and words for the paintings themselves. Not words to match the paintings—if I tried to do that I’d never write another sentence, but words to match my life journey as David Park’s daughter, standing there looking.
HPB
Palo Alto, California
2015