Today is the five year anniversary of Sammy’s father, Steve Zeisel, being gone.
I didn’t plan to write anything here today, but as we woke up this morning and made our coffee, sat in our little sun-soaked living room talking about grief, I looked around our home as I often do, and realized just how many pieces of art we have here that are Steve’s.
Steve wouldn’t have called himself an artist, he drew and painted all of these pieces outside of his regular job in DC. He took weekend art classes at the community center down the street, and carried a pocket sketchbook when he traveled.
But he was an artist, and his artistry continues to shape us. I spent the weeks after he died scanning all his work to a family google drive, and it was just astounding to see just how much he made. Most of these are the originals that each sibling agreed upon letting someone have, others are the scans I made and resized.
Below is the art of Steve Zeisel, in our home, and a quote we love.
(This umbrella watercolor is a scan and resize of a piece that Sammy’s sister has. It always reminded me of Paris Street; Rainy Day by Caillebotte – that painting was at the top of the stairs, at the entrance to the Impressionism wing at the Art Institute of Chicago and we loved it so much. It wasn’t until I had Steve’s painting printed larger that I realized I had an early film photo I took of Sammy in front of the Caillebotte).
We are almost entirely out of wall space, and yet still there are so many more I want to look at every day.
No matter if you call yourself an artist or not, perhaps today you can take out a little pen, pencil, or brush and draw a little something. You just never know how precious that might become to someone someday.
Finally, a quote below by Rebecca Solnit, from Field Guide to Getting Lost.
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
may we all be rich in loss.
ella p.