With | Hold

So it’s been a full week here and what have I done? Well, I began as I often do at a residency: start with a painting that has been lurking about and exorcize it. Fortunately, the piece that has been gray-matter-squatting ties in well with my desired focus whilst here at Monson: exploring gesture as both a way of learning and expressing a mindset, and employing new gestures to unlearn a thing you want to change.

The reference image is from a slide discovered when preparing for my mother’s December funeral, a picture taken before she existed for me as my mother. In this image, my impossibly young mom smiles for the camera, yet clenches one hand over the centre of her being and contorts the other arm behind her back. At first glance the pose seems elegant- hip thrust out to one side- but I was taken with the image because of the way she simultaneously holds and withholds herself in the gesture.

After tacking a piece of primed canvas to the wall, I drew with chunks of charcoal, working up a rough sketch until I heard myself quoetly say, “Hey, mom”. Then I smeared and sealed  the charcoal with a matte medium, pulling the blackness into the empty space to the left of the figure. Here, I took stills from a video I made of my mom‘s hands as she neared  the end of her ordeal with Alzheimer’s. Although she was not lucid, the hands holding mine were in constant motion, restlessly skimming over my skin like an explorer who has discovered new land.

This gesture unfurls my mom’s twenty something hand that holds herself together and pulls it towards finding mine.