One World to Another

by John Guare

I went to Cornelia Foss’ studio in the garment district of Manhattan on one of those cold days last March when you know this wind off some arctic steppes is the way it’s going to be forever.
It wasn’t a good time.  Lukas had died.  I was on my way to London the next day to see a friend who was dying. Other friends had died this past period of time. 
Cornelia had asked me to see her new work.
My mood was not helped by Cornelia’s studio which is in an anonymous grey office building in the west 30s.  I went up the shaky elevator to the 3rd floor and walked down the long grey corridor past remnants of the garment world – button makers – filigree merchants - to her studio.  She opened the door.
Behind her I could see bursts of color. 
I walked up to one of the canvases leaning against the wall.
A jagged burst of yellow against green fields -
This was the spring I had been looking for.
Forsythia against a field of fecund green.
  JG:  What’s that mass of black energy there at the bottom?
  CF:  Birds devouring something. 
But my eye kept being drawn to the focal point of the painting –
That slender daub of white at the horizon.
A beach.
What’s that great German military word: Schwerpunkt – Foss takes your eye past the green fields to that distant strand of white.
In spite of the lush greens and yellows, that place in the distance where the beach is – where the sea begins – that luminous white takes on so much weight that it becomes disquieting.
I think of William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow upon which so much depends.
I look around the studio at Cornelia’s other landscapes.
  CF:  That one is autumn – the two cardinals at the lower left – the cold mist rolling off the sea -
  JG:  The four seasons? Where’s winter?
  CF:  There is no winter.
  JG:  The ocean there – that’s not a sea you want to dive into.
  CF:  Then that’s winter.  I painted it in the dead of winter.
I sat in front of these canvases for a while.  The sensuousness of the colors, the way the paint luxuriates on the canvas. I wanted to inhabit them - the seeming delicacy of the paint’s application.  I look closely.  The paint only appears thin.   
  CF:  This painting has 5 or 6 layers.  Feel it. –
I do.  Though the effect is one of transparency, the paint is thickly applied but gives the impression of barely hanging onto the canvas.  Is she painting the fragility of nature, life’s peril?
I thought of a painting in her previous show that had made me wish I were flush enough to own it – a black and white and blue seascape at a moment before a storm is to break. The beach is the left side of the canvas, the sea the right. The furious sky connecting the two.  You know you should get the hell out of that beach, that sea, but the painting freezes you in the beauty of its danger.
  JG:  Have you painted landscapes other than Long Island?
  CF:  No.  What appeals to me about Long Island is its very flatness which is so American.  It couldn’t
   be anywhere else.  The way the fields run right to the ocean.  The endlessness of the ocean just beyond
   Wainscott Pond.  Other landscapes prepare you for the ocean.  Dover, for instance, where the
   landscape ends at the punctuation mark of the cliffs, a clear demarcation line between land and sea. 
   In German painting, landscapes are one chapter, seascapes another chapter.  On the east end of Long
   Island, it’s simply the fields and then the vast nothing of the sea all on the same plane.   
   You move seamlessly from one world to the other.
One world to another.
I thought of her haunting portrait of Lukas painted shortly before he died.
  JG:  One of my last images of Lukas is being at your place at Christmas and seeing him at the piano
  sitting underneath your portrait of him at the piano.  I must say there’s something sinister about it - 
  CF:  That portrait of Lukas is still at home over the piano.  The last few months Lukas kept getting more
  and more beautiful.  I had to paint him.  I didn’t intend for it to be sinister.  I started it as I would any
  other painting.  But then as I painted and he became progressively more ill, the void behind his eyes took
  over.  Sinister’s not the right word.  He was vanishing as I painted him.  Lukas said two days before he
  died: ‘I’m tired of this ghost town.  I’m trying to find a way to dis-engage.’  I put Sammy, our cat, into
  the portrait.  I realized later that in Egyptian mythology cats were the keepers of the dead in the after-life.
  JG:  Was painting it healing?
  CF:  No, painting Lukas like that wasn’t healing.
  JG:   Are your portraits going to be in your show?
  CF:  Oh yes.
She shows me other smaller canvases in the studio.  Two children – Cornelia’s grandchildren.
  CF:  That’s Olivia in the garden.  Look at that smile.  To see innocence and a lack of experience foreshadowing what’s ahead – both the terrible and the wonderful.
I hold the portrait of Eugenie, looking like an adult, that shadow across her shoulder.
  CF:  The courage of children because they somehow know that something’s ahead and it’s not good. 
  But they keep on.
Keeping on.  I think of her landscapes whose sheer lushness is mitigated by the awareness that some something is there on the horizon, in a corner of the painting, and that something is not good.  What I’m admiring is the dis-ease created by the way she perceives two worlds simultaneously. 
I think of her painting Lukas at that fuzzy demarcation line between life and death.  I think of her painting her granddaughters at this checkpoint between childhood and what they will be as adults.  I think of that slender strand of white beach.  I think of that painting in the last show of the sea before it bursts into some kind of gorgeous fury.
I ask her if this Long Island landscape will even exist in a few years?  Will it all be over-built?
Over-inhabited?  Is that what troubles the horizons of these paintings?
  CF:  Listen, in spite of the population and development, you know that we humans are only renting the
  land, borrowing the land, never owning the land.  And that landscape, those fields and the sea will outlive
  us, outwait us all.
I go back out in the street to walk home.
I think of the space between those two worlds: this Now – That eternity.
That is the subject of Cornelia Foss’ art.

John Guare is a playwright who wishes he could paint.