On Christmas Eve of this year, I received a phone call from a friend who had invited my mother to Christmas Eve dinner. My mother hadn't been home when they went to pick her up and it was beginning to get dark. Her car and dog were missing as well. I knew that, most probably, she had gone out and then gotten lost trying to return home. She has no short term memory, and her cognitive functions are getting weaker and weaker. I called the sheriff's office and spoke to a deputy, reporting her missing. After gathering the pertinent information,the deputy went to work, finally issuing an APB for Mom. Meanwhile, my husband and I gathered our dogs and headed up to Santa Fe(from Corrales where we live) to look for her, knowing we would probably be spending the night there.
By the next day, from credit card receipts which my sister had access to, we were able to track her voyage, from 2:30 in the afternoon in Santa Fe, to the last place she stopped for gas at 4:00 a.m. in Roswell, New Mexico, 200 miles to the south. In the meantime, a "Silver Alert" had been issued for her describing an 88 year old gray haired Hispanic woman driving a brown Honda CRV with a brown Aussie mix dog in the back(she isn't Hispanic). The alert scrolled across the bottom of the screen during the late news and then again in the morning. About 9:00 a.m., as we were getting ready to head back to Albuquerque(60 miles away), we heard a knock at the door. It was my mother. She had almost no memory of where she had gone or what she had done, just that she knew not to let the gas run out, and that she had made it back on her own. I took the car and drove it over to a neighbors so that she wouldn't have access to it, and was accused having always wanted to get her car away from her. We have no idea where she went(other than the credit card receipts), or what was calling to her that would cause her to drive for over 19 hours, in the dead of night, refusing to ask for help.
30+ years of paintings, talked about one painting at a time: what went into the paintings, what I was trying to say, what was happening at the time of my life that I made the paintings. The paintings themselves are narrative, and this adds a little more to the story that they tell.
Friday, December 29, 2017
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Woman Dancing(with Purple)2017
Chance
Noun: a possibility of something happening;
the occurrence and development of events in the absence of any obvious design
Adjective: fortuitous; accidental;
Verb: do something by accident or without design;
do (something) despite its being dangerous or of uncertain outcome
Recently, I've found myself only interested in creating things that happen by mistake. It's very "listen to the sound of one hand clapping" because I can want it, and want it desperately, but I can't make it happen. Woman Dancing(with Purple) was formed when I pulled the tape off of the hard edged line I was trying to make. The paint on top came up in a big chunk, revealing the purple and black painting underneath. Revealed, it was, of course, the body of the purple woman.
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