Place Imparted, Sky Painting

Place Imparted, Sky is part of a series of paintings entitled Working Memory, a body of work that contends with the ever so gradual loss of my mother as a result of Alzheimer’s disease. It is about a boy paying homage to his mother, remembering the gifts that she instilled within him, a deep love of nature and a purposeful connection to place. These paintings are mixed media works on paper – acrylic, pastel, watercolor – but I also collage organic material into the work, bits of pressed flowers and leaves and soil collected from my childhood home in Tennessee. The imagery of this work stems from onsite drawings and photographs made during my adolescence. I think of each painting in this series as a garden,or even an area of sky, filled with fragments of clouds and flowers, grasses and soil. Forms are in flux, between growth and decay, blooming and fading, remembering and forgetting.