June 2010 Archives

We have a wrought iron hand rail that winds along the wall of our staircase. It would seem the perfect thing to hold onto when sailing down the stairs.

For some reason, however, it always feels more natural to run our fingers along the opposite wall, the one without the handrail as we go down, grazing it with our fingertips like a windsurfer skimming the surface of the water, or a cyclist taking a tight curve, skirring the gravel.

Countless times a day we go up and down the stairs running our fingers along the same lines, just below each respective family-member's left shoulder. The lines were invisible, until recently. After so much time, the fingerprints have accumulated and, though barely visible, there are streaks, five streaks along the wall. It is time to spray them with some eco-friendly scrub and swab them away. Easy enough. Yet I haven't done it. I admit it's strange, but I like them. They remind me of the marks in the door-frame growing up which measured my hieght throughout childhood. They remind me of rushing down the stairs for the umpteenth time that night to get a bottle of warm milk for a baby. They remind me of running downstairs to make sure the doors are locked, to turn off the lights, to check on a sound, to get a glass of water. They look so hurried, like the quick strokes that indicate a comic book superhero is moving really fast.

I like them because I imagine that, given enough time, all those softly padded fingers of my children and my husband will eventually create permanent grooves in the wall, grooves that the next owners of this house will use to display thimbles, acorns and Matchbox cars, grooves that cannot be erased with a quick swipe of Quilted Northern. I like them because they pay secret homage to the wall that holds me up when I'm scrambling in slippery socks, half-asleep, to find children's Tylenol for one or two or three fevers, and I want only to collapse. 

Then they aren't fingerprints and handprints and streaks, but the glistening brow of a hard-working shear wall, tethering the dream-stuffed mattresses of dozing children, as well as their distracted mother, to the bedrock below.

I am looking forward to my father James Grashow's openning at the Taubman Museum of Art. Here is a picture of it waiting to be shipped from the studio in my family's home to the gallery in Roanoke, VA. It is a corrugated fountain, and the opening reception is June 10, from 6.30 - 8.00 pm. If you are in Virginia, come by! The show runs from June 11, 2010 - February 20, 2011

In the show's promotion it was written: Grashow creates works in a variety of media that address the themes of man, nature and mortality. The scale of his work ranges from large environmental installations, through which the viewer traverses, to the delicate and contained world of his houseplants, where tiny fabricated homes and buildings replace flowers and buds in intricately constructed bouquets. For the past three years, Grashow has been working on his most ambitious work to date; a Corrugated Fountain - an epic work reminiscent of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, complete with Poseidon, nymphs, rocks, waves, and an assortment of sea creatures. The idea of a cardboard fountain is an impossibility, an oxymoron that speaks to the human dilemma. Grashow has made something heroic in its concept and execution with full awareness of its poetic absurdity. His work can be found at www.jamesgrashow.com.

One of the strangest things abotu moving to California was the fact that no one I met had ever been in my father's studio. I couldn't imagine that anyone could ever understand who I was if they'd never been in that enchanted space. I suppose it's true for anyone, really. Our origin becomes our own private story, no matter how often we share.