Shelf Life: A Painting and a Poem
In 2013, Judith Austen began working on Shelf Life, an oil painting that turns the familiar architecture of a shelf into something more personal: a place for memory, identity, objects, humor, and the uneasy awareness of growing older.
The finished painting, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 inches, gathers an improbable collection of objects and images into its compartments: a figure wrapped in vivid color, books, vessels, brushes, a bird, a glimpse of water beyond the shelf. Like many of Austen’s paintings, ordinary things become charged with something psychological.
Painting the inner life
A photograph taken while the work was still in progress shows Austen in her studio beside Shelf Life, surrounded by the very kinds of objects that appear throughout her work. The photograph was taken by Janne McQuaid.
But Shelf Life was never only a painting.
On February 4, 2013, Austen also wrote a poem of the same name.
In it, she considers what it means to grow older in a culture increasingly preoccupied with youth, technology, and novelty. The metaphor is deliberately funny and uncomfortable: she imagines herself as a bookend about to fall from a shelf, only to realize that even the metaphor is becoming obsolete in a world of digital reading.
And then the poem changes.
Rather than quietly accepting disappearance, Austen populates the shelf with the materials of a lived creative life… paintbrushes, toe shoes, a clarinet, notebooks, flowers, and muses. The woman on the shelf remains theatrical, sensual, mischievous and very much present.
Her conclusion is wonderfully unequivocal:
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Shelf Life
Judith Austen
February 4, 2013
Shelf Life Oil on canvas 40 × 30 in. 2013
At favored pre-dawn hour,
I move from marital to alone bed
To read, write and think.
I pick up a section of Sunday’s NY Times
Plumy with today’s success stories,
Activists achieving noble things
all via cyberspace.
It's their world now.
I am a bookend about to fall off the shelf.
But they’ve got their reading on digital devices,
So even as a metaphor I am obsolete.
I wrap the old body in colorful shawls,
Take my position on the top shelf.
Gamey leopard on a limb,
I leave the ladders up
Albeit a step missing here and there.
I nest the shelves with still life props:
Bristle paint brushes,
Satin toe shoes,
ebony clarinet,
Moleskine notebooks,
My pickled muses under glass.
Come on up, boys, I beckon,
A brittle odalisque.
Bring me your bouquets
Fill those empty vases
I'm not going anywhere.
And take off those earphones
Before you wipe your feet.
