Wherever You Go.... (Return)

Performativity. Aspiration. Ambition.

None of these are old things for me, if you understand my use of "old" to mean foundational. I am not someone who picked up a pencil, a brush, a camera (in that order) in order to say something to the world or to seek out that world's approbation. This is not to demean such motives (which in fact can be quite noble and fundamentally human) but to contrast my own experience with such intentions. I drew because I was a child. I painted because I was a child. I made photographs—at least initially—to support my painting, and thus there was a streak of a naïveté there, too.

If I am an artist, it is not because I was a revolutionary but because there were some things from childhood that I never gave up, that (in words far more embellished than I would have phrased it then, but with which I think I would agree) I had made these artistic pursuits a fundamental part of who I was when nobody else was looking. We are what we do. We are all of us asked innumerable times in grade school what we will "be" when we grow up. We are described as what we "do." We—Americans that is—are obsessed with vocation and activity. And to myself, growing up, I was someone who made paintings.

Only to myself, I should add. Sure, my parents had some of my work on the wall, but other than brief hiccups (a few accompanied by adolescent tears) I never tried to make painting into a vocation. And as time wore on and my cares and fears of the world increased (as they all do when the thick fog of adulthood settles in), my paintings remained apart from it, a space defined by the sensual tug of wet brush bristles against the rough, almost acrid paper. To let collide my intentions and the way that the watery paints moved with a mind of their own across the page was joy.

The trees in these two images no longer stand. The poplars at right, which I watched bend against the wind so many times—from the attic window, the dining room window, from the sink in the kitchen—were taken down for a development that, thanks to 2008, never came. The Douglas firs at left, the natural porch that framed the banal landscape and the powerful sky, were taken down not much later. My father traded work to a tree-cutter, who lopped them off chunk-by-chunk. The house became more secure as a result, and much of the yard's red ant population disappeared (with no tears from us), but much of the charm of that backyard was lost in the process.

I have painted both scenes before, and in the case of the poplars, more than once. Trying to get back to basics, trying to find my way to one kind of home, I made these postcards with pictures of a more literal home. It wasn't until I was done that the conscious side of my brain remembered, as I related here above, that the subjects of these little paintings no longer exist.