Why knowing is (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat)
Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never seen that quality of light before even before having seen it in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch you recognize the red silk flower on her hat and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending through the light reversing foreground and background as the directions escape one as the way you have to live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair having written the whole of it in her head as the question ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.
From Why/Why Not by Martha Ronk. Copyright © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. All rights reserved.