Mother’s Day
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that mothers love tulips.” -Unknown
Acrylic on wood panel, 12x12 inches
For as long as I’ve been drawing and painting, my mother would always gently balk at the kind of things I enjoyed creating – I had (have) a serious thing for painting creepy things, like monsters, zombies, octopus, etc. “You should paint some pretty flowers one day!” she kept saying. Of course, I scoffed. How could she possibly understand the satisfying pleasure of drawing an icky gooey zombie? I’ve had such a long standing disdain at the notion, as if it were a bad thing, pretty flowers.
Entropy in Purple Acrylic on paper 14x10 inches - 2017
Residency, July 2018
In 2016, I began exploring the abstract and taking my chronic doodling habit to the next level, with more expensive art supplies. I wanted to dig into my moments of unconscious creation and see what I could find. What I found was that… I love it. Every new piece is an experiment, a new discovery, and an occasional piece of crap – which I also love. In my 2018 summer residency at SVA, the instructors challenged me with the question of what was my “content”, of which I had no clue, not to mention the horror of hearing that word outside the context of my day job. So now, I had a new riddle to solve. Subject, form & content. Spoiler alert, I’m still working on it.
In 2017, I got to see the David Hockney retrospective at The Met and in 2018 I had the privilege of going to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The words “some pretty flowers” still floating around in the back of my mind, a mom echo - started taking on a different meaning.
Which brings me back to the tulips. Being that it is Spring time and they’ve been stalking me, teasing me with their unreasonably vibrant colors and curvy yet graphic form - I decided that I was finally going to paint my mom those pretty flowers. Mom’s are always right, eventually. 🎨
