“Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.” ~Andre Breton

 

 Left: My Father, John William Friswell (1917-2005), Self-portrait (1938)

 

 

Epilogue

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid and yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his own living name.                ~Robert Lowell, 1977 artes fine arts magazine

This month’s portrait—small enough to fit in the palm of my hand—details a single instant in my father’s long life. His characteristic broad smile and confident attitude are captured here on film, for all time. He was twenty-two at the time, on his way back to college after summer break. He inscribed the details of the moment on the back of the diminutive, now-aging metal frame. The Date: September 5, 1938; the Place: New York, Greyhound Bus Terminal, enroute to Philly. He popped into a ‘Photomatic’ booth, drew the curtain, and for twenty-five cents, or so, memorialized the day for the future, in ways that he could never have imagined. Three years later, a world war would break out and he would spend the duration of the conflict in the Army, with an eventual duty assignment with the medical corps in the Pacific. I would be born back home during the very week that two Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. He would not return from the front, to see me for the first time, until several months after war’s end. My sister would arrive three years later.

During this Father’s Day month—and with an exhaustive image file of men to select from—I decided to share this singular impression of a particular father with my ARTES readers. He was known throughout his life for his grace under pressure, love of family and devotion to fairness and forgiveness,. He is missed every day, not simply because of his radiance, sense of humor and patience, but because of his time-honored values of honesty and rock-solid commitment to seeing the value and dignity in all of mankind. My father lived by a simple creed: do the right thing. His life can stand as exemplar for generations of his family that now follow, but also for an oft-threatening and confusing “misaligned” world that seems, at times, to have lost its moral compass.

I chose my father’s image for this month, June, 2013—in the words of Robert Lowell—“to give each figure in the photograph his own living name.”

Thanks for reading ARTES.

Best of everything from John’s proud son,

Richard John Friswell, Managing Editor