13 April 2020. Children's Games.
Got away from me, I'm afraid. Too complex--or I should have pulled in closer--I was split between whether to show the whole run of the street (a temptation) or just the dark opening of the passageway for cars. That being really the focus--something strange from the outset, maybe influenced by the general emptiness of the town--particularly on a late Sunday afternoon--and why were they standing like this, halfway into the dark drive-through, the man supervising the dashing youngsters--they'd claimed the narrow walkway along the side, but he was in there right in the middle, between two auto stanchions. The woman--I saw her first--had her back to the street, standing silently, watching, or lost in what might have been a kind of stoned amazement--that she was there, as if alone at that moment, with everything else unfolding around her--her children especially, who were running along the edge, unawares...
Several families like this, actually--where the bond between the parents and the kids remains taut, but now the foursome is placed in a larger psychological surround. The comforts of their connectedness--at least for the parents--only partly enough.
The source here, I think, would be Pavel Tchelitchew, the Russian-born surrealist artist--his painting Hide and Seek, which I must have first seen as a boy in Oceanside. I remember those interlocking whorls that he worked with--a head made up of a skein of linear hoops--white lines against black, like light... An image can register like this--stay with you for a lifetime. Or maybe it was the title...
Also here, Philip Guston's painting with children playing--Martial Memory, made during the war. He didn't continue with this kind of work after returning to New York, but the process, the way of thinking, stayed with him.
And one more. A drawing by Walter Hood--one in his early projects, in West Oakland. A boy running along pushing a balanced hoop with a stick...
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Note: Pavel Tchelitchew's nephew, Andre Tchelistcheff, an architect, was a student at Berkeley in the late 1970s. I always liked him--his angular Russian face, intense curiosity--and the way he smiled.
