Spring is officially here. The days are increasingly longer and sunnier, and I find myself walking over to the large window in my dining room at various points of the writing day just to see what is happening in the world of my street. There’s a little day school just across from me and sometimes I see a small village of children traipsing in through the wide front doors. I live just a floor above street level so I’m conscious of anyone who happens to stare up and look back at me.
One of the first things I do in the morning is walk through my apartment and pull back the blinds in each room. To let the light in, yes, but also in a symbolic sense to let the world back in after the cocoon of night-time. I have an older relative who can’t stand to have the blinds open in the front room of her house because of passers-by who might look in, so any natural light has to come from the other side of the house.
Windows are so revealing, both literally and figuratively, and I’ve often wondered what any one of us looks for when we peer through them. Or what keeps some of us from drawing the curtains fully open.
I love coming across works of art that feature windows in some way because I think that noting how we engage with this simple facet of architecture, one that is familiar across cultures and histories, could reveal some insight into human nature and how we live in the world.
Marc Chagall’s 1913 painting “Paris Through the Window” is a melodic and whimsical view of the city in which he was trying to make a new home, having left Russia three years previously. Using bold primary colours, subdued earthy browns and cool whites, he depicts a cityscape as if through an open window: the Eiffel Tower stands amid apartment buildings, and a transparent swatch of the French tricolore arches rainbow-like across the skyline. Just below the Eiffel Tower, a couple of figures float horizontally. A cat with a human face perches on the sill, near a two-faced man looking to the left and to the right.
The view of the world from Chagall’s vantage point is vibrant, dreamlike and full of magical realism: an interpretation of how the city blended with his own history and feelings. It makes me think about how our perspective on the world is always shaped by what we choose to focus on, blur out, or reinterpret in our mind’s eye.
Mostly when I am gazing through my dining room window I’m watching for birds, hoping that one of the many I hear early in the morning will decide to perch on my windowsill. Or, as the season changes, I’m watching the branches of the large maple-leaved plane tree that grows directly in front of my window, looking for signs of fist-tight buds.
In some ways, even when we are outdoors, we all walk around with a window of the mind, intent on seeing some things and not others, some people and not others. I suspect this is because our interests, fears, priorities and values all play a role in what we see and how we see. I wonder if the next time any of us looks out of our window at home or at work, we might challenge ourselves to see something we may not have noticed before. And to stay open to whatever thoughts or feelings waft into our minds as we give this new focus some attention.
What could such a seemingly small experiment reveal to us about ourselves and about how we consider the world? Where could the windows of our mind be opened further?
I am intrigued by the 15th-century painting “A Man Reading (Saint Ivo?)”, from the workshop of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden. A dark-haired man, thought by some to be Saint Ivo, stands in the foreground of the painting reading a letter with deep concentration, as if consumed by his interiority. His upper body takes up most of the frame and seems almost disproportionate to the window in the background. Through this partially opened window we see an entire landscape, with a town, a bridge and a castle. A rowing boat glides on a distant lake, there are riders on horseback, and through the lower left corner of the window we see people meeting, perhaps courting, beneath the trees on a lawn. The scene appears serene and trouble-free. The stark contrast between the interior and the exterior spaces of this painting makes me think about how in the same city, we never really know what any household, even on our street, is going through.
A few weeks ago I was visiting someone who lived on the 19th floor of an apartment building right in the heart of New York City. From her living room window there was an incredible view of surrounding high-rise apartment buildings which, since it was nighttime, were illuminated by row upon row of glowing yellow windows. I kept thinking how each of those windows contained a little world full of joys and sorrows, challenges and celebrations. All happening simultaneously.
It made me wonder about the worlds in my own apartment building, where there are just 12 flats, and how little I knew my neighbours. With more reflection, it seemed unfortunate to live in such proximity with others without necessarily having any sense of community. I’m not sure what exactly I’m suggesting, because obviously there is something to be said for respecting people’s privacy, but I do wonder if we could be more curious about the lives of those with whom we share buildings and streets, let alone entire cities.
I am struck by the use of the window in the 2021 painting “Quiet Mind” by the American artist Danielle Mckinney. A woman sits perched on the sill between the panels of an open window. Her face is turned towards the viewer but her eyes are cast down, so she is closed off to us, and it would seem also to the exterior world. But her body is partially outside and partially inside. She exists between spaces. In one hand she holds a cigarette and in the other a necklace with a cross pendant. A dark city landscape appears behind her, while inside the brightly lit room a painting of Christ or the Virgin Mary hangs on the wall. I am mystified by this beautiful painting because it compels me to think about windows as symbols of possibilities, thresholds to multiple different worlds that we can inhabit simultaneously even if it requires some quiet consideration of how to do so.
Both Mckinney’s and the van der Weyden painting urge us to consider how we navigate between the private spheres that we construct and inhabit and our wider environment, over which we have less control. Windows, as presented in these works, are portals to the outside world that invite us to reflect on how we want or need to engage with it. And, in the process, such considerations can open windows into our interior lives too.
Email Enuma at enuma.okoro@ft.com or follow her on X @EnumaOkoro
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