Drive-By Shootings: The Kitchen

One of my favorite paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Angel’s Flight by California artist Millard Sheets. 
I like the painting’s sense of isolation, with the two women positioned high in the frame, regarding the goings-on below, absorbed in their own thoughts. Geometry dominates the painting, and the women seem to be all angles and elbows, with their A-line and trumpet-flare skirts softly echoing the diagonal roof lines, stairs and fire escapes. Stairway to heaven, this isn’t. Perhaps they prefigure Damiel and Cassiel, watching angels who long to be corporeal, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire.

A mural covers an outside wall of The Kitchen at Fountain, a stone’s throw from Sunset. Its elements are the antithesis of Angel’s Flight -- the colors, less vibrant; the view from below, rather than above; a crowd, rather than isolation. Yet there seems to be a sense of contemplation and longing reminiscent of Sheets’s two women, although, with the absent-minded S-curves dual silhouettes, appear to be more harmonious with each other than the members of the mural’s shoulder-to-shoulder populace.

Loneliness takes many forms. Isolation and solitude are not synonymous concepts.

Angel’s Flight, Millard Sheets, 1931

Three images from “The Kitchen,” Silverlake.