THE MEMORY ROOT 2012

        This painting has been with me five years on my journey to my new life. I started it in 2007 near the completion of grad school. I found the canvas in the trash, painted with a badly done face at dead center and a city in the background. Somehow the eyes and the city stayed for a while and became part of the piece, though redone in my own style. In five years the work went through many changes, with the real tree roots, watercolor painting of the moth, and cut-away canvas just being done recently.

        This work was all about process, the person I was becoming. As in many of my other works I address the theme of rebirth through the moth and the tree itself. Although not shown in this painting, I strongly identify with the resurrection fern that grows on southern oak trees, a plant that appears to be dried up and dead but unfurls into vivid green when water is available. Such was myself without love, something shriveled and brown, just waiting for nourishment. But nothing is ever really gone, even the pain of young love lost or the roots of home when you are far away.

         Finally the frame of salvage wood represents the weathering of life, the individual scars and marks we all bear. I found this piece of wood in the Bogue Chitto River on a canoe trip in 2006 with a friend I will probably never see again. Long ago it was a tree, then it was lumber with nails making it part of a structure. Then a storm or time made the structure fall, where the board went into the river and stayed in the water long enough to rust out the nails and scour it down to the heart wood. Then it rode for miles with us in the canoe, then tied to the top of my car, then moved with me to four different homes before becoming this frame. (my dad thought I was crazy for moving driftwood!)

        I chose the name Memory Root to describe the nature of memories: jumbled and half-clear though the feelings are unmistakable even after time has passed. I tried to go beyond my own self to reach the viewer: a father that is just a picture, a lost childhood, puppies long gone, and the whirlwind of Hurricane Katrina that changed so many lives. Through death and destruction, underneath, is life and hope, stronger because of experiences lived.