I was just coming downstairs and I looked up to see the old portrait of myself at 23. It is the subject of a long essay I wrote over the past couple of years and is the subject of much thinking on my part about age, about agency, about the past. About artists and what they take, what they give. I looked at myself in the mirror to see how much of that young woman remains. So many times I’ve looked at her (me) and never asked her the questions my essay asks. But now as I’m about to turn 70 (a little more than a month), I’m curious. I don’t have an answer yet but I’m asking the question. I’m asking her if we are still the same woman, lines and all.
I see the haste of this work, the urge to put the young poet down on canvas, the firm line of the right part of my head. I see how he would have sketched with a brush dipped in black, a line here, and here, and here. My friend shows how the eyes are not symmetrical and they are the eyes I see in the mirror every day, not symmetrical, but these are not looking at me, not directly; they are implicating me in something I am only now discovering.
A day later, this morning, I come down the stairs early and look up to the blank wall. A small hook to hold the wire at the back of the frame, which has been dismantled, the painting resting flat in a safe place. Everything has been taken apart, dusted, looked at closely. I have talked and talked and talked. A blank wall, and somehow I don’t know where to look, whose eyes to meet. A line here, and here, and here, and on the face I see in the mirror, a line here, and here, and here.
...Theresa Kishkan 