About the Paintings ...
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Although I had been exploring the topic of how we are remembered and how we remember others for some time, my father’s death provided impetus for me to engage with this topic on a far more personal level.
Growing up, my family had a log house on a lake in the Laurentian mountains, and it was that place that I most closely identified with my father. In 2002, my family sold the house . From that time until 2012, when my father died, I found it very difficult to look at photos or drawings of the lake. After my father died, I discovered that while I still find it very difficult to look at pictures of him, I can now look at the thirty-plus years of material from the lake. I had collected stones over time and various trips, and already been working on a series of paintings of them (the beginnings of the Mortsaf series) when he died. Typical of the geography are massive granite boulders, and my father and I gave our own private names to many of those that ring the lake. I began to paint large-scale pictures of these: Mortsaf for My Father: Balcony Rock, 2014; Mortsaf for My Father: Resting Rock, 2016; and Mortsaf for My Father: Sanctuary, 2021. |
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