Time Travel Through Painting

When we were visiting our parents for Christmas my family was very kind and took me to the museum.  I wrote about it in my journal:  “I did get to see Van Gogh’s bedroom painting, visiting from Chicago to the Norton Simon, which was so beautiful in person—a dream of serenity---a dream of home that Van Gogh painted when he was at the asylum in Saint-Remy, having already lost that bedroom and everything it represented to him.  It was very poignant for me to see it, struggling as I am with not having a home of my own, no space, no room, no decent studio to work in.”

It is the main reason I haven’t been writing as much here.  Since we moved to the bottom of the Silicon Valley in September 2015, I have done nothing but struggle and miss my home.  Like Van Gogh, I too, have been painting from memory, using painting to cross boundaries of time and space and re-inhabit the place I miss most.  One of the paintings I am working on now is of Mimi, who died last year on one of my visits home, sitting in the long green grass in the backyard of my parents’ house.  I can’t pet Mimi anymore, I can’t even sit in the grass that I love and miss so much, but I can paint them, here, in this tiny, dark, cold place hundreds of miles away.  It is one of the gifts painting gives the painter.

 I am trying so hard to capture some images of life.  One of my new year’s goals is to try to write more here, to keep updates on the progress of my artwork and the spirals of my thoughts.  Since I rarely get to go out to art shows any more, I’ll try to write more this year about the art books that I am reading, and paintings that I am looking at in my memory, or through my post-card collection, which is its own tiny museum of art.