Studio ·
On Painting Family
Father and The Pain of My Mother were the two hardest canvases I have ever finished. They were also the two that taught me why I paint.
There is a moment before you paint your family when you have to decide whether you are making art or making an accusation. I sat with blank canvases for a long time before Father and The Pain of My Mother, until I understood the difference: an accusation wants to be right, and a painting wants to be true.
So the paintings hold everything at once, the way real families do. A house glowing in a flowering tree, and a grey world of crosses and money on the same canvas, sharing one root system. Grief and mothering in the same gold halo. I did not resolve those contradictions, because they are not resolvable. I just gave them somewhere to stand where they could finally be looked at.
People ask if painting these was healing, and the honest answer is: not while it was happening. While it was happening it was just hard. The healing came later, and quietly — the first time I walked past The Pain of My Mother and felt not the pain, but the painting. That distance is small, and it is everything. It is the whole reason I make this work.