Painted Lady, Russian Hill

by RC DeWinter

Title

Painted Lady, Russian Hill

Artist

RC DeWinter

Medium

Painting - Digital Oils-paintography-photopainting

Description

(Un)Painted Ladies

When I get restless I put on my walking boots
and clatter down the stairs
out into the great hum of this city of hills.
The salt air blows in from the bay
and the sun shines through clouds
as wispy as angels' breath and I am free,
lost in the crazyquilt of humanity.

Were I back home I would be an anomaly
among the perfect painted ladies
and men correctly clad in bespoke shirts,
but here I am a dull wren, passing unnoticed
in this most colorful parade. This pleases me.

It does my face no favors to outline eyes,
rubify lips, powder over the lines of living.
If anything, it accentuates my age;
the falsity of make-up is a harsh mask
that cracks with every smile,
every expression exaggerated
by attempting to conceal the touches of time.

Today I am climbing Russian Hill,
one of the original seven,
now a hodgepodge of old and new.
I come here often to stand on the sidewalk
and commune with a particular house,
one of the old and stately painted ladies -
nothing like the ones out shopping back home -
still standing.

It rises alone in its grandeur,
surrounded by buildings easily forgotten;
its famous sisters, the ones the tourists visit,
occupy the border of heavily-advertised Alamo Square.

If I were a house I would be this one.
Its lines are unchanged from the time it was built,
but the most beautiful thing about it
is how it has been allowed to age.
The shingles and trim wear colors faded by time;
no harsh overlay of falsity mars the timelessness
of its antiquity.
It too is an anomaly, one of a kind in its environment.

I have been tempted to climb the porch
and ring the bell and thank whoever owns it
for allowing the house to show its true self
in a world that worships the new and improved,
but that would be imprudent.
I may be old, but I'm not crazy -
not completely, not yet.
So I'll just stand here and admire
the beauty of its unaltered survival,
my unpainted face smiling up
at another well-made relic from another time.
~ copyright 2016 RC deWinter

A view of one of the iconic Painted Ladies of San Francisco, California. Reimagined and painted in digital oils from an original photograph - May 1991.

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Uploaded

January 12th, 2016

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