30"x40" acrylic on linen, 2022
 
During the pandemic I worked with residents within an assisted living community. It was a mutually beneficial time, our company a balm to each other. My ways of serving them - guiding painting, chair yoga, meditation, walks, singing, prayer, and conversation - offered sacred connection to a population suffering from prolonged isolation. Through those same seasons, I was adjusting to my children reaching college age and moving through preliminary dissolution meetings, and was grappling with some nostalgia. Some residents with memory impairment brought such sweetness to each day that I became increasingly aware of this paradox - that with less access to memory there was observable delight and joy in the present moment, and the bittersweet of what used to be only conjured sadness for those of us blessed with the sense of passing time. Further, remembering past hurts caused its own perpetual hell, with freedom awaiting when we choose to set down the baggage of stories we have been continuing to carry. The emptiness of the mind is infused with the meaning we assign, and I was interested in exploring that through this piece, the practice of non-attachment, and the inquiry if we suffer less when we release, or at least hold lightly. Aesthetically, I was enamored with the gentle pastels of my oldest daughter’s postage-stamp quilt, placed lovingly on her first mattress and still with her two decades later. The creative challenge in this painting was how to communicate visually the concept of what can come through when so much is blurring. I worked very differently here, painting a watery layer over almost everything with just a few moments where sharp color comes through, like notes in a song that remain when all else fades from memory.