The Artist and the Mysterious Portrait

I have toyed with the idea of self-publishing my short stories. Of course in that case the choice of cover art falls to the writer-publisher. One image particularly comes to mind for me if this should be what the future holds.

James Blacklaw Upright (1960-2018) was an artist of the later 20th and 21st century. He left behind an impressive body of work spanning collage to oils to digital media. He also penned stories. Though there is no catalogue proper, a selection of his collected work can be consulted in the volume Spirit Money, which you can virtually thumb through here. 

In this book one image (Untitled, p. 129)  particularly calls out to me: a portrait in daguerreotype, I think, of a young woman seated in visiting card style, likely from the 1840s. She may even have been beautiful. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have however left their mark on the surface, as time itself must have as well on her person as she aged and then left this earth, G-d only knows when, for her name and her history have been lost to us from the clutches of time 

The artist has lovingly left those traces of the past intact, that seem to stand for her past now, of usage from love or abuse which come to add their layers of story to a woman who has none any longer to show for herself ("within its bending sickle's compass come").

But this is not all.

Further to that the artist has superimposed traits of color over this scuffed and damaged portait. I see this addition in more ways than one. Firstly perhaps as a kind of balm to her wounds. Secondly, and this is connected to the first, as a way of adding to her lost story, her disappeared biorgaphy. A color she never would have suspected to join her portrait, like Dorothy opening her eyes upon the land of Oz. 

Why does she speak to me so?

For one she could be one of the ghosts I cherish, that past that, as Faulkner tells us, isn't over, it isn't even past. She may be long dead but her image stirs and circulates among the living, leaving us guessing her name, her narrative. Stories lost, stories saved, stories invented and unearthed.

She might be Vertigo’s Carlotta Valdez or she could be a tarot card telling the future while she speaks of the past 

It seems to me that this phantomatic and timeless spectre -hearkening to the past while the present gives her some kind of visual voice - could serve to interpret the kinds of stories that I tell. She well could be emblem, a figurehead as on a sailing ship of yore. 

We will see what comes to pass.