Rachel Cohen

This morning I went for groceries, had a zoom faculty meeting, the man came to help cement the cracks in our back foundation through which the mice are coming; my husband did the kids’ school and meals, wiped down the groceries… It’s a sunny and beautiful day, New York is running out of ventilators, Chicago is on the edge of serious trouble, I am probably already too anxious to write clearly.

For the last few weeks, I have had an hour or two, even three, to write, and have been able to write first, before the world arrives. I started doing that many years ago, first getting up early to write before my day job, then before teaching, then relying on my husband to take the kids first, but, anyway, not today.

Yesterday and the day before I wrote about Rembrandt self-portraits, and last night I tried to prepare an entry in advance. I was going to quote from Hervé Guibert’s powerful small book Ghost Image, in which there is an entry about Rembrandt self-portraits. But I am too restless.

I thought of Rembrandt’s quick self-portrait etchings, where he tried out different expressions. And this reminded me that, in storage at the Knoxville Museum of Art, I recently saw a wonderful set of nine self-portrait sketches done by Beauford Delaney.

They are so fast.

Done on little sheets of paper torn from a spiral notebook, you can still see the paper edges with the holes. (I was in a hurry, photographing in storage, and this one blurred, but is beautiful.)

Stephen Wicks, curator at the Knoxville Museum, and largely responsible for building their Delaney collection, the best in the world at a public museum, told me he saw the sketches in the holdings of the estate and had to have them. He organized them into rows three by three and framed that that way, but thinks other arrangements might also be strong.

This one draws back a little.

And this one I love.

I can’t draw a whole thought from this. But these quick self-reflections – economy, freedom, repetition, assurance, courage, flexibility, psychological curiosity, a relationship between introspection and geometry – these are what I want to be looking at on this hasty day.