I remember life through windows. When thinking about a certain period in my life, the first image that often comes to mind is the landscape I saw every morning when I woke up during that particular season. Windows can be calming, but they can also be reminders of certain types of loneliness. In the winter, outside my window, I often see people trudging down the street, faces obscured by winter outerwear. They lumber through the streets like apparitions, winter ghosts made out of sleet and snow. In the summer, however, the scenes outside of windows become more alive. People seem to sprint down the street filled with jubilation, sometimes drunken, yelling and shouting as music plays in the distance from a nearby car. Couples strut down the street, hand-in-hand, arms swinging like windmills. If one isn’t out there to join in this celebration, looking out of a window can be extremely lonely. Sometimes, however, that loneliness can be a source of comfort, something that can be quite beautiful.
While perusing the titles at one of my favorite bookshops in my Seattle hometown, I came across a cerulean blue spine boasting the title “The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick.” Elizabeth Hardwick was an author I was familiar with, many of my current favorite contemporary authors seemed to look to her for inspiration. I pulled the book off of the shelf, and was captivated by the cover. The painting on the cover of the book seemed to be a scene from a window, overlooking a New York City neighborhood. A vase full of irises sat beside the window, the purple of the flowers interacting with the impressionist mix of pinks and purples that made up the sunset in the background of the painting.
Artists have always been fascinated by windows. Therefore I, as an aspiring artist, am fascinated by windows. Staring out the window is like looking at a moving painting. I’ve had the same bedroom for two years now, and I get to watch the seasons change and shift every day. I witness the small red and orange leaves overtake the trees outside my window, blue jays fluttering from branch to branch, disoriented by this sudden development. As winter rolls through, and the inevitable snowstorm that occurs in Washington each year, I awake to the sight of trees devoid of leaves, branches covered in the white glow of snow. Months later, I observe vibrantly colored flowers, beautiful pinks and baby blues, dotting various bushes on my morning walks.
Artists of all types, whether they paint, make music, write, or all three, often write in front of windows. The musician Half Waif has a song entitled “Window Place,” wherein she states, “my life is like a window / i keep it clean”. The titular “window place” is the spot in her house where she writes much of her music, journaling and composing while watching the changing seasons outside.
The artist Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), who painted Early New York Evening, which was used for the cover of Elizabeth Hardwick’s book, is similarly fascinated with windows. While looking at examples of her work throughout her extensive career, one can see that she paints from the perspective of various “window places”. Early New York Evening features the captivating irises sitting on the window sill, interacting with smoke billowing out of various roofs, the sherbet-esque pink and purple sky. While looking at the painting, I found myself thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a quiet horror film in which the protagonist L.B., played by James Stewart, watches from the window of his New York apartment at the various figures who pass by, going about their lives in other windows across the way. Looking at Early New York Evening, I’m filled with an almost voyeuristic impulse to know what is going on in the other neighborhood windows. Some lights appear to be on, others appear to be off. I imagine one person solemnly making dinner for themselves. Their neighbor to the right has nervously invited a date over, and the two of them are struggling to make conversation, awkwardly trying to decide which movie they should watch. In the apartment below, the lights are off, and an individual is laying in bed, unable to sleep. Obviously, this is all just speculation. In this painting, Freilicher’s windows are just swaths of light or darkness, we are unable to see what is going on beneath the surface.
Though Freilicher paints her beloved New York City, her cityscapes are simplistic, generic enough to be any city the viewer wants it to be. Early New York Evening could be Seattle, Toronto, or downtown Portland. Looking at the painting reminds me of staying in the guest bedroom of my friend’s apartment in the heart of Seattle, waking up in the morning as the office building across the street comes alive, as the buses start running with greater frequency. It feels almost disrespectful to view a person across the way so clearly, watching them type on their laptop inside a cubicle, as if I’m interrupting something.
While studying her paintings, a memory pops into my head of being a child and staying in a hotel with my family. When I awoke in the morning, sleeping on a pull-out couch, I watched lights flicker across the city outside, people streaming by on the streets below the hotel room, clutching coffees on the way to their various destinations. Even at that young age, I could have watched this scene for hours. A window in a city is a source of entertainment, an almost endless art installation that is constantly in motion. It’s also a source of creativity, some of the best artists are known to be able to write or paint for hours in front of a window, speculating about their neighbor’s lives, the interiors of the various apartment buildings across the way.