10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary 13 of 30

Painting Diary 13 of 30: Mystic, 2015

My Mom’s health had been in steady decline for quite some time. We tried our best to help her and lead her back to health but things only got worse. It’s a long story. One April day in 2014 while I was at home on lunch I got the call that my mom was found dead in her apartment by the Mount Vernon police. It was apparently a heart attack.

Although we had seen this coming nothing could have really prepared me for that moment. The shock was deep and stopped me in my tracks. I remember the feeling I got a few weeks later, while washing the dishes and thinking, that now I would live for her, that I wouldn’t hold back anything or waste time. I wanted to make my mom proud even though her physical body was not there, and never would be, to see where I was going to go with my life next.

In 2015 I was mostly making pen drawings and for the one year anniversary of mom’s death I decide to make a portrait of her. Well into the process of this drawing she still had a face but I was really unsatisfied with how it turned out, and there was no correcting it since it was pen on paper. I stared at the drawing for a long time, ready to rip it up and start over. In this moment of wanting to destroy it, I decided that I may as well take a radical chance and creatively destroy it before resorting to burning it. I took a heavy black marker and blacked out her face. I had this vague idea that her face was a portal to the cosmos. If the mind is the seat of consciousness, and her mind was made of stars, that pretty much makes her infinite.

She sits in the midst of a psychedelic field of energy and life just coming into formation. Geometry blooms into loose organic structures that become lily flowers. Above her head is a lone hornet. I put the hornet there I think because I was still very much in love with the symbolism of hornets and that little fellow above her head is probably me…

Mystic, pen and marker on paper, 2015