Akimbo Artwork

NEW WORK ……. AKIMBO • 30 x 30 Personal Photography, Found Objects, Mixed Media and Assemblage on Panel With Wood Frame ....... From The Series — NO ROSES IN DECEMBER — A very personal series exploring memory loss and the ghostlike echoes left behind ……. 30% OF THE SALE OF EVERY PAINTING SOLD WILL BE DONATED TO FUND THE FIGHT AGAINST ALZHEIMER'S AND DEMENTIA -- My father entered full time memory care this fall. It’s been strange and difficult. Dementia is a plague upon our modern society, shattering lives in its wake. Those suffering have their identities and dignity torn from them, leaving a ghostlike echo of the person that was there before. I am exploring what I have personally observed about that process with my father and the haunting result of a mind in free fall. The works center around a group of photographs of abandoned adobes and lost vistas in the West Texas desert that I took this summer in preparation for these paintings. In those photos, where life was, only shells remain. What life is there is often solitary and hard-won. Those photos are then paired with abstract, mixed media painting and an array of vintage papers, found objects and other ephemera in an attempt to express fragmented shards of memory. The series title is a reference to a poem by Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy. Scottish "Peter Pan” author JM Barrie quoted that poem in a 1922 speech about courage, “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” But no memory means no remembered blooms in the chill of the December of life. I can only hope to express in some small way the harrowing, lonely, and wistful process of memory loss through this series.