This painting is one of several mysterious angels that populate Dad’s work. Their theme is consistent: it’s impossible to tell if the angels are arriving or departing. The expressions on the angels themselves are ambiguous—whether they are serene, under duress, or simply distracted. With Prince Street, is she fleeing over the wall or emerging from the cemetery that it encloses? I’m not sure that even my father could answer the question—that it would fall onto the viewer to decide, and maybe perspectives could change on any given day. He had unequivocal opinions about almost everything and had a hard time with people who fell squarely in the middle, yet some of his largest painted works featured celestial creatures with unreadable intent. It’s still impossible to know if he knew he was populating his work with so many of them on purpose or just by coincidence—a particular subject matter he simply liked. I prefer to think that Dad, who’d never been to a regular church service and was made uncomfortable by the pomp and circumstance, painted angels because he thought they were more complicated and more human than given credit for.

The wall in Prince Street is that iconic leaning brick wall around St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral; I watched it slump a little further and further down every few years. His rendering of its corners and the long, stained-glass windows of the church are the backdrop of my childhood. I feel particularly close to the painting because of how realistic the actual view of the wall of St. Pat’s is—not to mention the very human-seeming struggle of the angel to either gain a foothold or prepare for a long fall.

Because the process of finishing Prince Street took a few years, I’m wondering if the angel’s journey became more obscured by time. Whether she started out with a clear path, and Dad is the one who changed his mind. It’s another interesting moment, also of whether to stay or go, and I find myself in that headspace a lot because I freeze when faced with forks in the road. Dad had the discipline to stop things, quit things, sacrifice things without looking back, but maybe all of that was sublimated into these beings with wings that seemed unable to fly, frozen in the struggle of where to go next.

I always imagine the angel in Prince Street as on its way home and that somewhere in the slide down the roughened brick wall, out of breath and maybe in a Little Italy accent, it was saying “Take it easy, kid,” as it rushed to make it back before the gates were closed.

- Misa Kobayashi