To the Artist, Amos Engle, by Nina Shapiro-Perl

Through your hundred-year-old eyes, I, too, gaze in wonder.

Everywhere you turned, your eyes saw beauty: the ocean, the bay, the hills, the Sierra, the beaches, the shoreline, the docks and canneries. 

The young City by the Bay before the great bridge was built.

Your hand seized your brushes and paints and planted your easel where you could— and you gazed at the world around you, painting color beyond color.

You found a companion in another artist, Fanny Goldsmith, my great aunt, an unconventional woman from a conventional family, who in 1923, at thirty-one, travelled to San Francisco to live with you.

Fanny, a puppeteer, a writer, and a painter … You, a struggling artist traveling to Carmel, Sausalito, Nevada City, and the Sierra to paint. 

Mostly it was landscapes, but then there was Fanny– your muse and lover, and nothing was too small to escape your eye. 

Her heart-shaped face, framed by a brimmed black gaucho. Her dark, solemn eyes, the rose blush creeping up her cheeks. Her full bosom draped in black silk. A tiered brown skirt falling to her calf. Her legs casually crossed, with small-pointed shoes. Thin pale arms and tiny wrists settled on the chair. Her strength and fragility. Her gaze looking out, toward something. Your brush caught it all. 

And then something went terribly wrong, and you died in surgery. You were only forty-six, just reaching some renown in the art world. 

Fanny would return home to her family in New York, bereft and broken-hearted at thirty-four, to slowly remake her life, becoming a romance writer, a puppeteer, and the author of a famous cookbook still in print.

Twenty-five years after all this, Fanny’s kisses would skim my five-year-old face, like tiny flutters, her embrace fierce and startling. Her layers of silk clothes and silver rings and bracelets made her different from my other relatives, her voice singing the sweet and mournful “Come Little Leaves” that I now sing to my own grandchildren.

Fanny brought many of your paintings back East, where they hung on my family’s walls. They were part of the story I asked my mother to tell me again and again, about you and Fanny and her life as an artist. It filled me with possibility. 

Many of your works have hung on the walls of my own home. For years, I searched to learn more about you, barely finding a record of your name.  Long before I ever dreamed of moving here.

But it is your California that I now see around me, as I get to know my new home. Walking in the Oakland Hills, or on Mount Tam, or in Sausalito, or Point Lobos. Seeing the crimson sunset, the purple madrone, the deep green cypress, the curving hills with clusters of grass between their thighs.  

Among them all, it is your painting of Fanny that I treasure the most. 

Your Fanny, who inspired in me the possibility of living a different life, a creative life in pursuit of beauty … Whose hammered silver ring with the tiny ancient turquoise I have worn on my hand for fifty years. Fanny, who showed me that how we live, has the power to live on.

And who, for the briefest time, loved a man who saw color beyond color in this place that, 100 years later, I, too, call home.