6 am days and 6 pm nights
I looked around the room, the room I had crossed tens of times and I truly noticed it for the first time. Normally receiving a passive glance, something about Jacob Lawrence’s 1952’s Construction seemed to beckon me. The piece is fairly average in size, framed minimally. Perhaps I was attracted to its normalcy, to how unassuming the subject matter seemed. As soon as I got closer I was overcome with a wave of remembrance–I have seen this before. That is my father. Which one? All of them. The men shrouded in pale manganese blue are no strangers to me; they are my father, uncles, cousins, and grandfather. I stared at the figures forcefully, starting from the figure at the bottom left my eyes moved up diagonally and down again to the bottom right and again they looped around a few more times. Who is it going to be? Maybe I was waiting and hoping that one of the figures would glance at me and reveal a full frontal face that would be familiar to me but they, they were hard at work.
From their faces, I was led to their powerful blue shoulders framed by reds, browns, and tans. Like the sea, their poses were fluid. Crafted by curves in graphite and shadows in tempera my gaze was again stuck in loops: a shoulder in shadow followed by the seam of a shirt meeting an arm connected to a shoulder, two legs framed by the shadows of the hips and hamstrings contrasted with a white background. Like brick, their arms were strong. Varied line-weight delineated fingers including a fingernail on the thumb of one. Curves and curved shadows gave way to thick forearms and weighty biceps. This is work.
A few days passed before I returned. Construction, the title, invigorated me. What exactly is being constructed? I had a feeling that I was being submerged beneath scrap wood and screws. What are they building? The boards were inexplicably crisp with dimensionality and weight but I could not shake the feeling that everything was a mess like I had stumbled into this scene before a devastating collapse. I went down the line of screws, left to right and tried to speculate which one would be the traitor to the project. Light was captured perfectly on each screw with shadows beneath their tops reinforcing the metallic brightness.
Trailing the pattern of luminous “white” led me across the piece to patches of yellow-white between and around the legs of one figure and the blue-white steel square in the hand of another. That was when I noticed that the piece was not entirely on one plane. The boards had different faces whose lines convened at different vanishing points. Suddenly, the shadows marking the boards seemed to contradict which objects were in the fore, middle, and background. I could not figure out if I was looking at a series of individual boards or several boards that were connected in some manner. What are they building?