Arrange to fall a deliberate distance from the tree
The year comes full circle, starting and ending with paintings related to my brother, Chris, whose absence is a continuous presence. The final layer on this one returns to the color of the base layer, deemphasizing the final state to more prominently feature the changes that happened in between the beginning and the end. The creation of a painting is inevitably an allegory for a life lived.
It starts with unrealized potential. Then we start moving. We get up, we go to sleep, we go to school, we come home, we change homes, we go to work, we come home, out and back, out and back. We iterate through repeating patterns, making minor improvements, or, at times, massive revisions as we go. All this is happening on a world revolving, with a slight wobble, around a sun that is spinning within an rotating arm of the milky way that is also on a trajectory. Plot out the thread of our locations and we are lines looping through spacetime, ovelapping, parting, strings plucked and thrumming. And all that reverberating and interweaving is all still there, stretching into the extruded ribbon of the immeasurable past, just no longer accessible to our finite, temporally locked selves. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even the past.” The same goes for Chris, for me, for us all.