Process ·
The Symbols That Keep Returning
Hands, hearts, houses, suns, pathways. I stopped choosing them years ago — now I just answer the door.
Every painter has a vocabulary, whether or not she chose it. Mine announced itself early and has never really changed: hands, hearts, houses, suns and moons, roots, pathways. For a while I worried this was repetition. Then I understood it is closer to a language — the same words, saying new things each time they are arranged.
The hand came first. It is the oldest mark humans ever made on a wall, and it is still the most honest one. A hand says: I was here, I touched things, I reached for someone. When I pressed my own hands into the paint for Why Are You Here, I was doing what someone did on a cave wall forty thousand years ago, for what I have to assume were the same reasons.
The houses are always two houses — the one you came from and the one you are building. The hearts are always larger than anatomy allows, because feelings do not respect scale. And the pathways, dotted across dark panels like maps of thought, are there because I have never once known where I was going, and painting is how I walk anyway.