One of my first acrylic mix media paintings on canvas in the #1990's.
I recovered it in 2020 after my mother passed away at the begining of the pandemic.
My mom had begged me for it for at least a year or more after it was painted. At the time, i didn't want to part with it.
But as i thought about it, i figured there was no one alive who would take care of this painting more than my mother.
I figured there was no one else who loved it more than my mom.
It was also one of the few accomplishments that i knew my mom recognized.
I also knew she genuinely loved it and it would bring her some happiness during her life. (And it did)
I also guessed that one sad day in the future, (which happened to be exactly thirty years) I would become its owner again.
So, I gave it to her for her birthday. I felt it was one way to genuinely show her, how much I loved her.
It hung on her wall until she passed away at the begining of 2020. She loved this mixed media #painting #artwork
I guess its kind of ironic, that i almost never painted it, because my mom had crushed my dream about being an artist when i was a kid
She had broken my heart, my dream, with her words when I showed her my first pencil sketch and rendering of an old Kodak instamatic camera. I still have that rendering, and its still an amazing render for a young kid who had never drawn or been taught anything about art.
Like many things in my life, where i had the greatest potential, my mom crushed those ambitions too.
I will never understand why. Did she somehow feel threatened? Did my talents not fit her idea of who or what i'd become? Did her parents tell her she had no valuable talents and crush her dreams and passions too?
The window on painting is real wood with photographic negative film of the fingers of two hands intertwined, which represents the passing of time and generations.
Though the old man is technically a reproduction of a famous oil painting, it's my interpretation in acrylic.
My goal in my early paintings was texture. I was obsessed with textures, and if you have ever worked with acrylic artist paint before. You know its a very flat and low textured paint. So creating textures required a lot of creativity.
This painting has never meant more to me or made more sense to me since my mom passed away right before Christmas 2019.
It was really hard to give this painting to my mom, because i had to set aside all the brokenness from the words which delayed, side tracked and ultimately crushed my childhood dreams to be an artist.
What would have happened if my mom had believed in me? What would have happened if she had just rolled with it and backed me up, encouraged it?
I'll never know, because by the time she had to admit my talent, the dream seemed to far away, to dead in me, to torn, and so all of my rare and occasional art from that time into the future would always and has always come out of the bitter dark places I never want to visit.