Feast Day Painting

oil on linen Temporarily available though 33Contemporary on Artsy. On a level practical and personal, not too long ago and quite by chance, I arrived for the first time in a town near my ancestral home in the Campania region of southern Italy. I was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu, of homecoming. I am landed here in this valley and I have a sense of remembering this place I have never been. I wasn’t always an immigrant. I come from a long line of farmers. On a spiritual, transcendent, collective level, I am curious about who I am/who we are; where I belong. I am concerned with identity in a sense possibly deeper and broader than the superficial cultural contexts usually used to construct ourselves, though not disregarding our seemingly obligatory relationship to them. (I wasn’t always a farmer.) I am concerned with the process—the search for and exploration of identity, rather than any attempt to supply definitions. I find myself delighted by small mysteries, synchronicities; inexplicabilities. This valley remembers being a lake. My recollections of my great-grandmothers’ stories change my understanding of my children. Beyond the stories of my specific blood ancestors are the stories and memories of a greater collective. I’ve always hated the way the myth of Icarus ended, with our hero crashing, almost wingless, into the sea. I would set out to find an alternate ending—one in which our identity is maybe not so bounded by oblivion. I am interested in the way memory (not just literal, tangible memories, but senses, suspicions, a feeling of connection and familiarity) affects the definition of self and maps our location in reference to “other,” (should there turn out to be such a thing in the end). I construct images as if I am searching for significance in the places, things, faces that rise to the surface of my mind together in ways that they might not have actually existed, like a dream that feels important, the meaning of which, however, often feels veiled to me. Behind and below there are things as important as what’s above and ahead. These opposing directions place us here, now—a position that feels very oddly both fixed and fluid.