What is common to them all? Don't say: "There must be something common, . . .-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to them all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!

Ludwig Wittgenstein 1

There are two young trees, both Prunus mexicanus, planted at the same time but a dozen feet apart in our front yard. Grown from seeds of the same tree, the few years of their growth has disclosed similarities and differences. One is taller, more open, its leaves smaller, more lanceolate, and with but little propensity for suckering; the other is shorter, more densely foliated, its leaves larger and more round, and it suckers incessantly. One might well spend a fair amount of time looking at them and puzzling over how they have become so different in such a short time. Genetically, they are not that different: they are from seeds from the same monoeocious parent. Nor is their nurture that different: they are in the same soil, receive the same water, the same light. Yet they appear to be quite distinct, though they are clearly siblings: their branching structure is identical. Neither nature nor nurture seems sufficient to explain the differences, though nature alone might be supposed to suffice in explaining their similarities. Probably every parent has marveled at the same phenomenon: how each of one's offspring has come to be distinctly individuals, and yet all are clearly one's offspring.

One supposes Leah Ehrich to have thus marveled at her daughters Lisa and Stella, and their respective work as artists, as her Portrait as a Still Life at the left of the gallery entrance seems to do. That two of one's children become artists is in itself something of a marvel: it is far from clear that ability in-and the other requisites to a professional career in-the visual arts are simply a matter of nature, or of nurture. It is equally unclear that it is not a matter of nature, or of nurture. It seems a safe if evasive assertion that the matter entails both nature and nurture, in an interaction too complex and too subtle to be readily disclosed by any calculus one might devise.

One might suppose, given this complex of nature and nurture, that a sufficiently detailed biographical critical analysis would serve to explicate the work. So it might, if the work was simply and exhaustively a mirror of the artist's life, thus entailing a supposition of a relation between work and life consisting in simple mimesis. Short of a sweeping expansion of the extension of the term 'artist's life', it is clear that this cannot suffice, for too much of significance to the facture of the work-not to mention the work itself-is thereby left aside. Indeed, even given an extension such that the term 'artist's life' is regarded as co-extensive with the fullness and repleteness of the lifeworld in which the artist is embedded, exegesis turns still on interactions other than those normally excluded from the term 'artist's life', but now somewhat artificially subsumed as sub-classes of the term. It would seem more expeditious to save the step of expanding the term 'artist's life' and merely attend directly to these other interactions. None of which is to say that adverting to the artist's biography is always without efficacy; it is merely to urge that exclusive reliance on biography is not necessarily efficacious and never in itself sufficient. If this is so, any single cause will not suffice. One is left framing multiple questions, as Ursula LeGuin suggests:

The histoire is the what
and the discours is the how
but what I want to know, Brigham,
is le pourquoi. 2

To answer the question of why the work is as it is presupposes other questions. This is not merely because 'as it is', as Wallace Stevens urges, 3 is to invoke "the intricate evasions of as." To ask the question of why the work is as it is to beg another question: in what way-how-is the work, that one can ask why it is as it is? In the end-or more precisely, in the beginning-this presupposes an adequate phenomenological description of the works in their concrete particularity, but which may be subsumed in one's response to the totality of each work, and of the several works as parts of a body of work.

What strikes one, in response to the totality of the works, is the individuality of the artists and the similarity of sensibilities informing the works. The works of Leah Ehrich, Lisa Ehrich, and Stella Ehrich are distinctly that of individuals, distinguished not merely by the obvious differences in media-etchings and drawings, ceramics, paintings on panel-and of their respective concomitant means of formal invention, but also by a wide range of motifs. Yet, notwithstanding those differences, an underlying similarity of sensibilities obtains. A quietness, a stillness, a calmness, pervades the several works, even when an implicit animation informs the work, as in Lisa Ehrich's Portrait as a Still Life, and the figures in Stella Ehrich's Red Dress I, II and Orange Dress I, II. What does it mean to say this? It does not mean that all of the works have a particular quality in the way that each member of the set of all red things have the quality 'red.' The redness of the members of the set of red things is a quality inhering in the things (albeit as an accidental and not as an essential quality), while the sense one has in the perception of the works of quietness, calmness, stillness entails emergent qualities, which is to say one thus perceives not a tangible property of the work but rather a matter of one's perceptual experience of the work. Of course an emergent quality must ultimately be grounded in the formal qualities of the work itself-where else could it be grounded? But if the emergent quality is grounded in the formal qualities of the work itself, it also necessarily entails viewer response. As such, the emergent quality is constituted neither solely within the work, nor solely within the viewer, but in viewer response to the work, that is, in the relation of betweenness of work and viewer. The constitution of a perceived emergent quality is thus analogous to the constitution of a mood. As Heidegger urges: "A mood assails us. It comes neither from 'outside' nor from 'inside', but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being." 4

But first, as Wittgenstein admonishes, first "don't think, but look!"

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953, 1958, 1966), 31e §66.
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire," ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 187-196; initial publication in Critical Inquiry 7:1 (Autumn 1980) and 7:4 (Summer 1981).
3. Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," VIII, 136-144. Poems by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse. (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 145-152.
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson ( New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 176 [H136 ad fin].