Maggie Levine- Maggie Levine
ArtWrite 10/20: Daisy Patton
Updated: Dec 4, 2020
My husband and I raised our sons in the brownstone apartment in which I grew up. The presence of the past was impossible to avoid. Every time I walked up the stairs, I imagined the wallpaper pattern that covered the stairwell when I was a little girl, gold owls imprinted on a two-tone green checkerboard. I'd stare at the owls, and they'd morph, Escherlike, into side-by-side peacocks. Memories were embedded in the sheetrock all the way to the studs.
My mother renovated or redecorated the apartment multiple times, each iteration corresponding with a different period of my childhood. Living there as an adult felt like looking at decades of slides stacked on top of each other, so dizzying that I wanted to look away.
