March 21, 2021:
I found Jacob Lawrence on Haight Street, mounted and framed, through his strikingly-beautifully-odd print, "The Lovers".
Tilted, seemingly drunken perspective. Record player, presumably jazz. Cigarettes, alcohol. Her perplexed expression as she observes him apparently taking her pulse.
What exactly is this scenario?
At that time my brain was broken. I'd just stood up a beautiful girl I'd loved for years because I forgot we'd made a date. I was addicted and disoriented, not entirely unlike the slanted perspective in Lawrence's image. It spoke to me as much for its confusion, its mystery, as for the vibrancy of its beautiful and beautifully discordant-harmonious colors.
Later as I explored his catalog I found him speaking to me again and again. "Bus": the sly evocation of an entire society in a single humorous frame, with a larger implication for all of humankind. "Confrontation at the Bridge": the Selma campaign, with its bloody breakthrough into white consciousness. His Harlem series, his Great Migration series, his war paintings. Compassion, struggle, history.
He's sometimes labeled a "story painter", but that's inadequate. It's patronizing and diminishing. Lawrence was a painter of histories, where histories are always those of struggles. Lawrence was a "struggle painter". Including the odd, tilted, out-of-kilter struggle of lovers on a couch.